You might be considering setting up a new website. Or perhaps you already have one but wonder if you should change your web hosting. Either way, it’s good to know that your hosting choice is important especially when it comes to getting more people to your site. Because which hosting you choose plays a role in the speed, reliability, and security of your website. Let’s dive into these three pillars of SEO-friendly web hosting.
A few words on web hosting
Web hosting is a service that hosting companies provide that makes your website accessible and visible to others. You rent space from a web hosting service provider, ensuring your website is reliable, secure, and fast. Your web hosting company also ensures your website is connected to the internet. To put it simply, a web hosting company provides space for your website’s data and makes it accessible to other people. Without hosting, your website simply can’t be visited by other people.
Web hosting and SEO
Choosing your hosting provider is one of the first steps in creating an SEO-friendly website. So don’t take this decision lightly. Not only does it impact the speed of your website, it also determines how reliable and secure your website is. All three of these are important factors in your SEO.
Site speed, the 1st pillar of SEO-friendly web hosting
The speed with which your page loads is important for your site visitors and SEO. Proper web hosting understands the importance of site speed and ensures shorter page load times. But if your hosting service is slow, your pages will take long to load. Losing your customers and impacting your rankings.
Why is site speed crucial for SEO?
Search engines like Google want to provide their users with the best experience. That’s why they like websites that load fast and tend to choose those websites over ones that take a while to load. So, if you want to appear in the search results, you must work on your site speed.
So why is site speed important in someone’s experience with a website? Having the right product or answer to someone’s question is more important than how many seconds it takes to load that page. Of course, your content and what you’re offering is and will always be important. But there’s competition out there, and someone’s experience with your website determines whether they’ll return. Or how long they’ll be on your website in the first place.
Websites that load fast have higher conversion rates and lower bounce rates. Being frustrated with how long it takes to open a page does more to a site visitor than you realize. You might have already lost them before they even saw your page. A page that takes a while to load also means that Google takes longer to see what’s on there, which leaves less time for your other pages. Slow pages often come with loads of files that need to be loaded, meaning that Google has to use more resources to read what’s on there. All of these don’t make Google’s bot very happy.
A slow website provides a bad user experience all around, and Google doesn’t want that, that’s why site speed is a ranking factor. A slow website can hurt your rankings, as search engines will choose to show your competition (with a faster website) over you.
Reliability, the 2nd pillar of SEO-friendly web hosting
When we talk about reliability in web hosting, we’re talking about the uptime of the websites that are being hosted. Unfortunately, no hosting provider can guarantee your website to be up and running 100% of the time. A good hosting company will ensure your site experiences minimal downtime.
Why is reliability important for SEO?
How reliable your hosting is determines how high the uptime of your website is. So, your provider determines how accessible your website is. Of course, we’re talking about a small percentage here. Most hosting providers ensure that your website is up and running almost always. But even if the difference is a small percentage, you want your website to be up as much as possible, right?
You are not the only one. Google also hates it when it comes across a website that’s unreliable in its uptime. This leads to poor user experience and makes it harder for Google to crawl your pages and new content there. That’s why and how reliability can impact your rankings. So choose a hosting company that ensures minimal downtime, even more so if you have an online shop or (expect to get) lots of traffic from your website.
Security, the 3rd pillar in SEO-friendly web hosting
The third pillar we need to discuss is security. In addition to being fast and reliable, your website must be secure to protect itself and your users from cyber threats. This may sound a bit dramatic, but it’s important to handle your user’s information with care and prevent your website from being hacked. Having a hosting provider that takes security seriously is vital nowadays.
Why is security vital for SEO?
As with the other two topics mentioned above, search engines like Google prefer websites that have their security set up properly. Websites that handle their user’s information carefully and take all the precautions they can against cyber threats. Again, it all comes down to user experience. Users trust Google to take them to trustworthy websites, and Google doesn’t want to damage that trust. That’s why Google and other search engines prefer secure websites.
Having an SSL certificate, automatic backups, and scanning for malware. All of these show that you have invested in your website and the privacy of your users. Earning you that trust to be one of the top results in the SERPs (search engine result pages).
Bluehost, your partner in web hosting
After reading all of this, you might wonder where to find a reliable hosting provider to help you with the above. Bluehost is a great option to look at if you’re looking for SEO-friendly web hosting.
Bluehost offers you a guaranteed uptime of 99.95%, takes security very seriously, and knows the importance of site speed. The team at Bluehost takes proactive steps to enhance your site’s performance and speed. Read more about that in their blog post on how Bluehost delivers the fastest web hosting for WordPress with high performance.
