What do you do when you want to buy a product or service? Unless you know exactly where and what you want to buy, chances are, that you use an online search engine to find the best options available, right? In recent years, search engines have evolved as the go-to option for people looking to buy any product or service. Therefore, for site owners, optimizing their websites for search engines is very important. If a website can feature on the first few pages in the search engine results, then the chances of getting visitors increase. There are many factors that affect the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your site. Of these, website hosting plays a crucial role. Most new site owners opt for shared Linux hosting services as they are affordable and easy to start. However, before selecting a Shared Hosting plan, it is important to ensure that the plan allows you to boost your SEO efforts.
In this article, we will talk about SEO and web hosting in India and look at how a hosting plan can impact your SEO efforts.
How web hosting impacts the SEO of your website
SEO is a process of making your website search engine-friendly. There are many factors that impact the ranking of a website in the Search Engine Results Pages or SERPs. While the quality and relevance of the content play an important role, site performance factors like security and speed are equally important. This is where the choice of the hosting service can play an important role.
Here are three ways in which your hosting plan can affect the SEO of your site.
1. Security
The internet is full of hackers and miscreants trying to gain unauthorized access to your site and create havoc or steal sensitive information. Site owners, online users, and search engines are highly aware of these threats too. Hence, most websites spend time and money to boost security. Also, search engines recommend sites that are well-secured. Further, Google flags sites that do not have an SSL certificate installed and displays a ‘Not Secure’ tag near the URL of the site. It also deducts some crucial SEO points. Also, if the site has frequent security issues, the search engine might not want to recommend it to users.
When you buy a hosting plan, you must ensure that you assess the security measures taken by the provider. While a Shared Website Hosting service has a few known security vulnerabilities, if the provider is using the right tools and taking proactive measures to detect and manage viruses or malware, then you can be assured of a secure hosting environment.
2. Site Speed
When it comes to user experience on a website, the loading speed of the page plays an important role. People have a low tolerance for slow-loading pages and tend to abandon sites that take more than 2-3 seconds to load. Search engines are also sensitive to this aspect and don’t recommend sites that are slow-loading. This is another area where the web hosting plan can help.
The type of hosting and the resources attached to it can impact how fast a webpage loads. While Shared Linux Hosting with cPanel is good for startups and new websites or those with low traffic levels, for high-traffic sites, a more powerful hosting plan is needed. You can also look for the measures taken by the host to boost the speed of your site like caching servers, CDNs, etc.
The following video explains how you can boost the site speed in a Shared Hosting setup with Varnish caching:
3. Uptime
If you try visiting a site thrice in three weeks and find it down, would you try visiting it again? Probably not, right? A site that experiences frequent downtimes can be bad for your SEO since search engines wouldn’t want to send users to a site that is not working. Uptime depends on the hosting server and infrastructure. Hence, while buying a plan, it is important to ensure that the host offers 99.9%+ uptime assurance.
Summing Up
Remember, whether you opt for a Shared or Dedicated Server, Windows or Linux Hosting services, finding the perfect hosting plan as per the needs of your site is essential to ensure that your SEO efforts pay off. As you can see, the hosting plan can impact three crucial aspects of your website. Hence, research thoroughly, compare options and consider all aspects before making the decision. Good Luck!
