SEO doesn’t just rest at the mercy of keywords and phrases. It also takes in to account website functionality, loading times, and uptime. These things determine how much engagement and interest a user will have with the website.
Slow loading times, buggy functionality, and low uptime can translate into terrible user experience and a lower SEO ranking. So here are 5 web hosting SEO factors that can directly impact your search results rankings?
1. Downtime
Your host almost always causes website downtime. Its causes can include hardware failure, overloaded servers, or security breaches, etc. Your SEO performance can suffer tremendously if your site is offline even for just a few minutes. Google can flag your website as unreliable. If the downtime is increased from minutes to hours, or days, Google can even de-list your site.
2. Slow Loading Speeds
The only thing worse than a site that won’t load is one that loads slowly. Google factors loading speeds into your SEO score. Sites that take more than a few seconds to load suffer penalties. Those that load instantly, will be able to see an improvement in their search rankings.
To ensure your website loads quickly, upgrade to VPS, or cloud hosting instead of shared hosting. Also, make sure that the host’s data center is geographically close to your audience.
3. Shared Connections with Spammers
Shared connections are a common issue since you can’t choose your host sharers with many shared hosting providers. However, if you share a link with spammy websites or email addresses, you can hurt your search rankings. Google bumps your rankings up and down depending on which websites you’re associated with as well. Hence any shared IP addresses, which include spam websites, will be indiscriminately penalized. You can check if which sites share an IP address with you through the Reverse IP Domain Check.
4. Connection Failures
If visitors keep seeing an “Internal Server Error” or “Database Connection Failed” warning message, the server is overloaded with traffic. Your SEO score won’t suffer as much as if the entire website were offline. However, it will push your site’s bounce rate up. That will impact your SEO web hosting rating.
5. Wrong TLD
If you can help it, your website URL should use a .com TLD (top-level domain). This is assumed by people to be the default domain whenever they check out your social media page or an ad. If your website ends with a .net or a .co domain, visitors can have trouble finding it.
While this shouldn’t ideally impact your SEO score, life’s not ideal. The best .com website domains have already been taken. So there’s a trade-off. If your website’s name is short and memorable, and the TLD isn’t too obscure, you should do fine. However, if new visitors keep re-entering the wrong domains, they won’t end up on your site as often as possible. That will impact your SEO rating.
While these aren’t the only five factors that impact SEO, they are quite important. So look out for these factors when you’re picking out a hosting provider.
