Amidst a lot of noise regarding SEO, one-factor website owners and administrators tend to overlook is web hosting, which also can significantly impact the uptime and speed of your site as essential elements for better organic performance. The hosting services you choose can have a significant impact on the consistency of your website and its SEO value.
If you would like to prevent any server errors which ends in page time outs or what to stop the users from bouncing back from your pages, one should think of a solid web host to rely on. Always choose s host which support your organic SEO efforts and not impeding them. In this article, we will look at some key features to point out the SEO friendliness of a WordPress hosting service.
Guaranteed uptime
The uptime guarantee of your host is inarguably the major considerations to make to ensure SEO-friendliness. Uptime/downtime clause refers to the percentage of times on an average your site will be online for the users to access. Higher the uptime is, more likely the visitor will reach to your site and stay on it. Once if they come to your page and instantly go back to the search engine by seeing a server error will pose a significant risk in your site SEO.
More reliable professional hosts tend to offer a better uptime guarantee. Say, for example, it will be ideal to choose a host genuinely guaranteeing 99.9% uptime. This equates to about 1.44 minutes downtime a day and as minimal as 8.8 hours a year. This is affordable. However, don’t also trust those who offer uptime 100 percent. It is too difficult to manage a server without any downtime at all, and the key to success is to limit it to the minimal possible time.
Location of server
When uptime accounts to the availability of your site content to the users majority of the times, server location decides how quickly they can access it. If you have hosted on a shared server or dedicate or VPS, then your site is located on some physical server anywhere in the world. Ideally, it is best to have your data center nearest your target group’s location for faster performance. The father your hosting service may be, the longer it will take for the users to get the site loaded.
Similar to the users, server location can also be fishy to crawlers for search engine ranking, which will ultimately affect your SEO. If your corporate office is in a country, but the target audience is on the other part of the world, you may better choose a local host for better performance. Along with this, there is also the need for the servers themselves to be fast, and the host must boost its performance through a dedicated CDN (Content Delivery Network).
Various options
Whether it is website design RFP or customized hosting solutions, we like to get maximum options. This is applicable now for WordPress web hosting services too. With tight competition in the hosting industry, many of the providers now offer a lot of value-additions too to upgrade your website. When it comes to SEO-friendly add-ons, here are a few things to consider.
- Automated backups – If something goes wrong and you lose your content, a suitable website backup can help to restore it quickly. Check if the host offers automatic backups.
- SSL security – As we know, HTTPS stands synonymous to security and remains as a key ranking factor. If you haven’t used this secure site, you need to ensure that your host support SSL and move on to it.
- Hosting packages – As your website grows and the traffic increases, you must have to think of changing your hosting. Ultimately, for a growing business, the traffic becomes huge enough to think of getting a dedicated server. This upgrading will be much cheaper and quicker if you approach hosting providers offering such features (according to The Hosting Institute).
Security
As we know, poor security can tamper the SEO value of your website. It means your website and database is prone to attacks and hacking, the creation of spam pages, and may generate a huge number of fake backlinks also the site. This is something Google may instantly penalize. By the time you identify these fraudulent activities, your genuine pages may have already removed. It is difficult to revive if Google already imposed a penalty and the damage is already done.
Compromised security also increases the chances of the website getting affected by any malware, which may further lead to getting your website blacklisted by major search engines. The users may get a security warning on their search results about your site. So, before considering a web host to sign up, ensure that they possess the adequate technical expertise to maintain security and malware removal support to protect your website from any attackers.
Looking at reviews
It is essential to compare various hosts to identify the hosting features and offer the best solutions for your purpose. However, simply understanding the features are not enough, but you have to validate their claims also to make sure you get it in real. So, before you finalize a host, take some time to read the reviews and do some baseline research.
If someone experiences anything bad about the host, you can surely find that anger and disappointment in the feedback. However, you may not trust all the reviews too if you find there is something too good to be true as it is possible to put polished reviews by the providers itself. Having said this, it is surely possible for you to gather much valuable information about the provider from the reviews. You may also trust the ratings by unbiased third-party service grading portals. Along with all the above features to ensure SEO friendliness of your host, it is also essential to consider the technical support offered by the provider.
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Most of the professional hosting services now offer 24/7 support to the clients. If any disaster strikes, you should get them dedicated and supportive for your purpose to ensure it doesn’t affect your business operations. A professional, reliable web hosting service is one major thing running in the background if you find yourself successful in achieving the SEO goals.
