So when it comes to SEO, most businesses get locked into the keywords, backlinks and content marketing. All of these pieces are important, but there’s one key part you might forget about — your web hosting service. Your chosen hosting company has a direct impact on your website’s speed, uptime, and security – all of which determine your SEO and Google rankings at the end of the day.
For us at WireTree, web hosting forms the backbone of a winning digital strategy. Now, let’s drill down and discuss how hosting affects your website’s SEO.
1. Website Speed and Load Time
Google was very explicit: page speed is a ranking factor. A sluggish site also pisses off visitors and results in higher bounce rates, and this degrades rankings—shitty hosting results in slow servers, or outdated infrastructure.
Your Website Gains Power with an Experienced Hosting Provider:
- Fast servers with SSD storage.
- Optimized server configurations.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN) integration.
These aspects not only speed up your website, which is beneficial for SEO, but also make it nicer for users.
2. Uptime and Reliability
Search engines like sites that are always up! If your site is down all the time due to poor hosting, it tells Google not to show it. This is something that can slowly lower your rankings over time.
A good hosting plan offers you 99.9% uptime to keep your website up for visitors and search engine spiders to crawl your site.
3. Server Location and SEO
Google applies retargeting signals to determine which websites rank for location-based searches. Wherever possible, host your site on servers close to your audience to speed up load times and increase local search relevance. For instance, if you’re a Toronto-based business and host your site in Canada, you’ll likely see improved local SEO.
4. Security and SSL Certificates
Google prefers secure sites, and having an SSL certificate (HTTPS) is a requirement for ranking well nowadays. Web hosts that offer free and included SSL certificates provide your site with an SEO boost.
Furthermore, hosting with robust security measures, including firewalls, malware scans, and DDoS protection, ensures your website is immune to threats that could potentially harm its SEO performance.
5. Scalability for Growth
When your traffic increases, so must your hosting. Poor hosting can result in sluggish performance during peak traffic periods, increased bounce rates and damage your SEO. With scalable hosting options such as VPS, cloud hosting, or dedicated servers, your site will remain fast and reliable no matter how popular.
Wrapping Up
Web hosting is not just a technical decision – it’s a strategic choice for the sake of your SEO. With the right hosting plan, you can increase your site speed, ensure better uptime averages, improve security and outperform other companies as far as Google rankings are concerned.
At WireTree, we help companies choose hosting that aligns with their SEO objectives and drives growth.
Want to improve your SEO with better hosting? Get in touch with WireTree, and we’ll set you up on a solid digital platform.