Bad hosting is killing your organic

Most people overlook search engine optimization (SEO) when thinking about web hosting providers. That’s because the metrics web hosts are responsible for often fly under the radar. But hosting impacts on SEO in ways you might not realise. Ever done an SEO scrape of your website? 

Well, run one now! It only takes a few minutes and you’ll see one of the first stats that matter.

Load Speed

Now, website design has a huge impact on page load times, so you’ll want to make sure there are no rogue plug-ins or oversized images causing havoc. However, if you’ve done that and you’re still seeing poor load times across mobile and desktop, it’s time to talk to your host. Ask about their server load and cache system to see if performance can be improved. Not getting the response you want? Time to shop around!

Already on the market? Well, make sure you know where their servers are located.

Server Location

Where the host servers are located really impacts your data transfer speed and – just as importantly – suggested results from search engines. When you type something into Google, ever noticed that your device location is tracked? Don’t believe us? Scroll to the very bottom of the page of results and you’ll see where you’re located. Even if it’s general, it still impacts what page results you see and in what order. Search engines use many factors to determine what to display and one of those is a location match between you and the website that’s suggested.

And it goes without saying that the website has to be online more than it’s not.

Uptime vs Downtime

You want to ensure as close to 100% uptime as possible. That’s because there are more than just visitors trying to reach your website. Search engines are too. They’re crawling your website daily, looking for updates, and checking it’s working. This is another way hosting impacts on SEO, if your web host is down due to technical issues, that’s a black mark against you. And it doesn’t take much for search engines to start de-ranking your page if it starts to look unstable to the web crawlers.

But it can be as stable as ever and still rank poorly if it’s unsecured.

SSL

Rankings have been impacted by their HTTPS status for years already, so put quite simply… don’t go with a web hosting service that offers anything less. SSL is required by a lot of data protection standards as well, so you’re doing yourself a favour on multiple fronts by starting off with a secure site. We offer free 256-bit SSL certificates as standard, so it’s not an ask for your web host to do the same. Many firewalls will prevent access to unsecured sites automatically, so this is a really critical element of web hosting that we can’t emphasise enough!

As with any list, these factors aren’t exhaustive so it’s best to do your own research before committing to any long-term contracts. If you want to know what our packages include or have a question about one of these metrics, just reach out to one of our knowledgeable team members here.