How Poor Webhosting can Harm Your SEO
If you’re using your website as an income generation tool, you have to ensure that there are no bottlenecks along the way. SEO is important and there is a lot you can do on your site and beyond to improve your search engine visibility. However, none of this will matter if you are working with the wrong web host.
It’s easy to see a web hosting service as nothing more than a place to rent out server space for your site. Although a good web hosting service will not do much to help your ranking, a poor web host could hurt it.
Table of Contents
Downtime
Uptime is a regularly quoted factor when you go shopping for a web hosting service. Uptime refers to the percentage of time that your website is available. However, you should be more concerned about when your website is unavailable – downtime.
The search engine ‘spiders’ will possibly try to visit your site several times on a given day. Should the spiders come several times during periods of downtime when your website is not accessible, your site could get flagged as unreliable. This may cause you to tumble down the rankings.
When it comes to uptime, even 99% of uptime is not adequate nowadays. Good web hosting services can guarantee at least 99.9% uptime.
Speed
Depending on the content of your website and other factors, your page may take some time to load on a user’s computer. Your web host, on the other hand, can have an impact on the speed with which your site loads. If your web host lacks the resources to ensure that your visitors can access your content quickly, it may have an impact on your rankings.
Google did state that the speed at which a website loads would be factored in when deciding rankings. An experiment conducted in 2013 showed at the time that it was actually the speed of the web servers that could affect the rankings. This was because of a correlation between the Time to First Byte (TTFB), and the rankings.
According to Brendan Wilde of free parking (a good web hosting service), “Websites with servers and back-end infrastructure that could quickly deliver web content had a higher search ranking than those that were slower.” if you need help feel free to talk to FreeParking about hosting your site.
For this reason, you’ll want to ensure that the web.co.nz host you choose has enough bandwidth to ensure that your webpage’s loading speed is fast.
Security
According to Infintech Designs, if you intend to run an e-commerce site, the security of your web host’s servers is critical. Your site will be handling critical information belonging to your customers including credit card information. As the site owner, it is your duty to ensure that your host’s servers can withstand attacks from viruses, malware, and hackers. If your customers don’t have a satisfactory shopping experience, they’ll likely not return and without enough returning visitors, your rankings will suffer.
Location
The location of a server is important in determining where your website will rank in local searches. If you live in New Zealand or if your target area is New Zealand, choosing a local server such as Umbrellar may give you higher rankings than choosing a server in another country. This is especially the case since Google started using IP addresses to determine the locations of servers.
Get a great web hosting service and improve your chances of success through improved visibility that would potentially boost your profitability.
