Building a new website? Two of the most important factors you will need to take care of are web hosting and SEO. Web hosting gives you space on a server to connect your website to the world, while SEO brings people in by making your site easy to find on search engines.
But did you know that your hosting choices can actually boost SEO? It may seem counterintuitive that something as basic as the hosting you choose will affect how search engines consider your website, but there are a number of factors that make hosting an essential part of your SEO strategy.
Follow these 4 important web hosting hacks to boost SEO.
Use CDN hosting
Content delivery networks (CDNs) make content available as close to your visitors as possible. Instead of delivering the content from one server at all times, the CDN will load your data from interconnected data centers around the world. CDN hosting therefore makes your website load much faster, no matter how far away from you your visitors happen to be.
Why is this important? One of the major factors that determines SEO score is speed. The closer your website is to someone’s location, the faster it will load. This will even be true when loading data-heavy pages, meaning there is as little lag time as possible. Search engines which ping your website will always find that it is as fast as possible.
Speed is vital when it comes to SEO ranking, which means you should always choose hosting that optimizes speed.
Optimized Data Management
Your hosting should therefore have added features that optimize your site to ensure you are not making a page too data-heavy. You may have uploaded pictures that have particularly high pixel counts and take ages to fully load. Good hosting will flag this for you and give you options to compress it.
However, most of this work will be up to you, and the better you do it the better your hosting itself will function. Optimized data management may also be a part of your web design software.
Choose hosting with minimal downtime
Some websites simply cannot afford to have downtime. Millions of people rely on them being accessible at all times, and even the occasional hour will have drastic impacts on people’s lives. Chances are, your website is not that important. At least, it is not so important that a visitor needs to access it right now. However, that does not mean you should tolerate downtime in a host, even if it is a cheaper option.
The reason is that the more downtime you have, the worse your SEO score will be. This is true no matter how many people the downtime impacts. It is not something you can compromise on, even if it will save you money.
Opt for VPS hosting
One other major factor that impacts your website’s speed (and therefore its SEO) is bandwidth. The more bandwidth available, the quicker your website will load. On the flipside, with less bandwidth, even low-data websites might take time to load. The problem with shared hosting is that bandwidth is first-come first-serve. That means that if another website has a surge in traffic, your website may become sluggish.
VPS hosting is still shared, but a certain part of the server is entirely dedicated to you. It is more expensive, but you will never have to compromise on bandwidth.
Hosting is important when it comes to boosting your SEO score. Use the above hacks to ensure your website is quicker and more likely to make it to the top of Google’s first page.