While building your website you are probably focused on layout, graphics, content, SEO, marketing, and advertising – all vital components of a good website. It turns out that where you choose to host your website matters too.
Before you choose your website’s design or content, you need to choose a good web host that won’t affect your rankings. One of the factors Google and other search engines look for when indexing web pages is how fast they load.
A good web host won’t get your website listed on Google’s first page, but a bad host will ruin your credit with Google and other search engines. The web hosting provider’s server type, location, speed, and uptime will affect your website’s credit with search engines. Don’t let a bad host ruin your website’s search engine ranking.
How do you know if a website hosting company is bringing you down? There are five web host traits that search engines like Google hate, and that will bring your SEO down. So, instead of possibly ending up on the third page in search engine results, your website won’t show up until the tenth page, all because of a problem with your web host. Check your web host for any of these five aspects.
5 Web Hosting Traits Search Engines Hate
#1 Slow Speeds
The faster your website, the better. When someone visits your website they shouldn’t be waiting for it to load. You’ve probably been there – you click on a link and get a blank page because it’s still loading. If you have a good connection it should load close to immediately. If it takes longer than a few milliseconds to load you click away to find a website that is faster, right? Right. So, search engines aren’t going to rank your website high in the search results when it’s too slow.
If it takes longer than two seconds to load there could be an issue with your web host, and you really need to fix this problem. Every millisecond counts. Mike Albert writes in his article, How do I Know if a Web Host is Reliable?, “Between 7 and 10 milliseconds is considered to be the optimal speed, but anything under 100 milliseconds is satisfactory. This should have your pages loading in under 1 second, which Google considers to be fast enough to rank well with them”. Test your website speed here.
#2 Too Much Downtime
It doesn’t matter how fast your website is if your website is down too much. When a user clicks on a link to your website, it should be available. Your website should almost never have a problem, and the uptime must be, at a minimum, 99.9%. Anything less is unacceptable. Look for a web host that has a 99.99% uptime. The closer to 100% the uptime is, the more time your website spends live.
#3 Server Locations
If you’re visiting a website that’s slow to load, it could be because the location of the server is far away from you. If the website’s server is in China, and you’re in New York, there could be a delay. That delay will cause poorly affect your SEO. Your website hosting servers need to be close to where your visitors are located, whether their your neighbors or in another country.
For example, if you have a website with your targeted traffic (people you want to visit your website) located in the United Kingdom, you should find a web host that has servers located in the UK so your website will be fast for your visitors. Doing this will help your search engine rankings and SEO.
#4 Shared Hosting
Shared hosting provides an affordable way to get your website online fast. Shared hosting makes no difference when it comes to your website’s SEO, according to Matt Cutts, a software engineer who used to be the head of Google’s web spam team. So, you might be asking why shared hosting is included in this list, right? Well, there are some empty claims about shared hosting not being good for your website. It’s basically a conspiracy theory. Just check out what Matt Cutts said about it.
#5 Connection Errors
Connection errors due to your web host are serious. If your website host is having problems connecting people with your website, how will they even view it? It doesn’t matter how super fast your website is if it isn’t accessible!
If your web host is causing database connection errors with your website, your SEO will be adversely affected. You may have seen these error messages when trying to visit a website: “internal server error” and “database connection failure”. These errors happen when your web host can’t handle the amount of traffic your website is getting. Your website crashes.
Always ensure your host can handle your traffic.
How to Take Back Your Website
It’s time to switch to a better web host; one that won’t affect your website’s SEO. You can keep your domain name and change your web host. It’s easy if you follow this article!
So, now that you’ve reached this part of the article, you have a good understanding of what not to accept from a hosting company. Get a good web host by checking out our reviews here. You’ll find one that won’t bring you down in the search engine rankings, and will give you the best bang for your buck.
..very good post.
Thanks, Olivia!