Does web hosting have an effect on SEO?
There are 3 web hosting factors that influence your website’s ranking. Here’s an in-depth look at them:
Uptime/Downtime
Downtime is the period of time when your website cannot be accessed due to server related issues. Search engine spiders are likely to visit your website many times a day. However, if they visit when your site is experiencing downtime, they will log your site as inaccessible and move on to the next site. When this happens over and over again, your website will be considered unreliable and your ranking may be lowered. Untrustworthy sites do not show up in search engine results, as this will put them in a bad position when searchers click on the results they provide but cannot access the site. Even if the uptime is 99%, your website will be inaccessible for a total of 7 hours in a span of 1 month. If possible, you want your website to be 100% accessible at all times. However, websites are expected to experience some type of downtime even if they have expensive web hosting plans. However, there are web hosts that offer and guarantee 99.95% uptime, so don’t accept less than that.
Speed
In general, search engines do not reveal the factors that pertain to their algorithms. However, in 2010, Google openly revealed that the speed at which a page loads is just one of those 200+ factors. This is certainly a very small percentage effect (just 0.5%) on your rankings. However, it is still worth keeping in mind. The loading speeds of their web pages are as follows:
When you have a below-average upload speed, you shouldn’t necessarily blame your web host. The slowdown may be due to the coding and configuration of your website. However, if you’re sure that your site’s technical setup has been optimized to the best of its ability, but you’re still getting poor load times, it’s time to ask your web host to transfer your site to a different server. Nowadays, it is quite common for a website to share server resources with many other sites. Unsurprisingly, more sites on a server consume more resources, resulting in slower load times. When you transfer your website to a private/dedicated server or one that is not too busy, you will see a rapid improvement in page load speed.
To lease
In addition to several different factors such as content and backlinks, among others, in order to display the most meaningful search results, search engines evaluate the location of the website to decide where to place it in their rankings. For example, when searchers are located in the UK, search engines will typically show sites located in the UK higher in their search results. To find out where your website is located, they use some indicators like your site’s IP address, which is assigned to your site based on the location of the server where it is hosted. So when your web hosting company has servers in the UK, this could cause a higher ranking for your site when people from the UK search for the keywords you have chosen.