Could Your Hosting Be Harming Your SEO Rankings?
You might have spent thousands on your new website and it works perfectly with smooth transactions and providing an excellent visitor experience but are you missing out on traffic due to your hosting being limited. As much as you try offer a great experience there are many factors out of your hands and one of the main ones is your hosting. Below we explain some reasons your sites performance could be being hampered by issues not under your control due to your hosting.
Site Speed:
If your hosting provider is cheap and you went for the cheapest option or didn’t really do any research then it could be harming your websites performance. Your hosting could be slowing down your website and also providing a poor experience for your site visitors. Maybe your hosting is a reseller of a 3rd party company in which case they might not even be aware fully of the technical aspects of the hosting they provide to you. Nothing frustrates a site visitor more then a slow loading website and you can be sure they will quickly leave and visit the next website.
Google also factors in site speed as a major reason to not rank your website high in the free search engine listings. So, if your site is slow then you won’t achieve 1st page rankings, potentially losing out on thousands of free visitors and potential customers.
Hosting Downtime:
The only thing worse then a slow loading site is a site that won’t load at all. Instant loss of custom. Your buyers will simply go elsewhere straight away and your reputation will be damaged as a result. What’s more Google will also flag your site as unreliable and as a result you could be penalised and your natural and free SEO rankings will be harmed. Your site will soon drop down the search engine rankings to a position people won’t find you at all.
Hosting should be guaranteed at least 99.99% uptime or even 100%. Make sure you shop around to find companies that provide this guarantee.
Database Connection:
If your website uses or relies on a database, such as a shopping site then any issues with your hosting’s ability to interact with a database will quickly become apparent. If you have thousands of products and there are other websites on the same hosting with the same any technical issues will soon start top hamper your website.
You can upgrade to a private and not shared hosting to stop this but always speak to the hosting provider to make sure first. Most reputable hosting companies nowadays can cope with databases including large ones. If you are on shared hosting and another website suddenly has a huge increase in traffic then this could affect your websites performance.
Shared Hosting:
Unless you have stated otherwise then chances are your website will be hosted along with hundreds of other websites all on the same server. This can be ok if your website is a small info based site but should your site require a function to be performed then this is when you could see the effects of a shared hosting platform.
One way to avoid this is to have your own hosting, using your own dedicated hosting and server. These aren’t really expensive though not as cheap as shared hosting. If you share hosting with a spamming website then this could cause real trouble for your website also. Ask your hosting company if you are on shared hosting, chances are you are.
SSL:
One thing to check is if you swap hosting that they have an SSL in place for your site, last thing you want is for your site visitors to get the dreaded this site is not secure pop or the SSL is out of date. This doesn’t happen often but always be safer rather then sorry and make sure by testing your website once you are on your new hosting.
