When thinking about creating a website, hosting is one of the most important features to consider. It will influence your website’s accessibility, your website’s security, your website’s speed and so on. But, did you know that high-quality hosting solutions can also influence your Wordpress website’s SEO?
There is a lot more to SEO than relevant, link building and keywords. Wordpress website owners can accomplish numerous tasks that can make a significant difference in how their website ranks in search results. For instance, choosing the right web hosting solution for your website can boost your traffic tremendously.
Here’s how you can do it:
In the SEO industry, there is a concept that targets the page-load speed : the faster, the better. While it remains true for all websites that speed remains a priority, it is not exclusively the point. SEO is about the users and potential buyers who visit your site. It’s about what they want, what they need and whether your website actually delivers the goods as it should do.
Did your visitors see what they wanted? Did the right pages load quickly? It is mandatory that your visitors see your site’s main content fast. The “secondary” content can take longer to load, that’s perfectly fine. This concept is called First Meaningful Paint. It’s a factor in how your site ranks because it gives your visitors what they want and Google enjoys it.
Then, while the actual page-load process may be three seconds long, your visitors will be able to see all your significant content in one and a half seconds. This happens because the elements that take longer to load are not crucial for the immediate visitor experience. The Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest or Twitter logos may take longer to load, that doesn’t matter. From the user’s point of view, the load will remain under 2 seconds.
Once the user is on your website, keeping them there is your main goal. If Google sees visitors to a certain page and then comes back right away within a certain time, it means that the website doesn’t deliver what the visitor is looking for. If you have a slow website or irrelevant content, it can bounce your users right back to their search results, and you certainly don’t want that to happen.
Another essential aspect of high-quality user experience is uptime. If a user or Google requests your website and it’s always timing out or the server can’t return results, then your user’s experience will be disappointing. Be sure that you have as close to 100 % uptime to offer a premium user experience to all your visitors. This will not only improve your conversion rate, but your users are more likely to come back and tell their friends about your Wordpress website!
In addition, there are two load-time factors that Google utilizes to measure your site and both can be altered by your hosting solution. The first is DNS lookup. The longer it takes for your host to complete DNS lookup, the longer it may take for your host to start loading your page. Longer look up time can affect your site rank.
The second factor is page load time. If your hosting solution uses a slow and outdated server, you may be in trouble. If your server takes longer than a hundred milliseconds to load the first byte, this is never good for your site traffic. The ideal time it takes the server to answer a browser’s request should be half of that, so 50 milliseconds at most.
Always use clean code: Even the best hosting solution cannot save your website from poorly and outdated written code that slows down your load time and ruins your user experience. Make sure that you keep all codes light and clean. JavaScript, extra CSS and all the files that are not necessary for your website to load don’t belong in your code. Finally, always ensure that your code is W3C compliant by using a markup validation service.
Improve your Wordpress website's security: You all heard this story once before. An unsuspecting business manager gets hacked regularly, hackers adding links to the website without the owner’s knowledge. Of course, Google sees this website with unrelated links and penalizes the website’s search rank for it. To avoid this situation, you must work proactively to keep bad links and hackers away, or choose a hosting provider with an impeccable reputation to help you keep those hackers at bay.
Measure your website’s loading speed and time to first byte: When choosing WebsiteBunker as your hosting solution, we provide you with a tool that can find out how long it really takes to load and communicate with all the browsers. You can test from every region!
Consider managed hosting: When you choose managed hosting, it makes the management of the users’ experience easier. It addresses tons of issues that website owners generally have. Also, with managed hosting, you are paying someone else (Website Bunker for instance) to worry about the SEO-critical backend of your site, so that you can concentrate on other things, like creating relevant and interesting content.
When letting someone else take care of your hosting, it also means that you are ready for the unforeseen, like a spike in traffic or an unpleasant visit by hackers. If you let Website Bunker take care of your hosting and security solution, you will have more time to invest in creating great content and doing amazing work for all your users and potential users, instead of driving them off your website. If you take into account how important website performance is for your SEO, it will always be an essential part of the puzzle.
Uptime and downtime: First of all, let’s be clear : even the best web host servers are not able to guarantee 100 % uptime. Things can happen along the way and it’s perfectly normal. Most reputable web hosting companies will usually boast “five nines” uptime, meaning, 99.9999%. This is not bad, you would say.
Whether you like it or not, there will always be intermittent downtime when your website will not be available for users, visitors, and search spiders. You can only hope for the lowest downtime possible from your web hosting provider.
Also, the uptime/downtime of your web host strongly depends on the resources used for its servers. The higher the server specs, the more expensive your subscription will be. But, in the long-term, it will be money well invested.
Website availability: Another feature that affects your search engine rankings is your website’s availability. Most search engines and especially Google, don’t like to redirect their visitors and users to websites that are not available. This is why they check and can remove (at least temporarily) from the index websites that have availability issues.
Your website’s availability is the responsibility of your web hosting providers. Failure to do so will result in damaging your online reputation. The worst possible thing that could happen is that downtime will happen when you are sleeping. If you don’t have any website monitoring tools in place, you will lose traffic and customers.
If you wish to drive geo-targeted traffic to your website, the best way to do it is to have a server located in your own country. If your customer base is in a particular location, choose a server that is located in the same place or as close to the location as possible, to provide minimum latency. If your website is targeted for Canada, you will want to host your website on a Canadian-based server, and so on.
However, if, for any reason, your web hosting provider does not have a data center where your customer base is located, will it have an impact on your website? Yes and no. It is your choice of hosting provider, the services they offer and the type of hosting you choose that will determine the quality of your page load time.
When choosing your web hosting provider, pick one that offers CDN (Content Delivery Network). Content Delivery Network is a network of servers located in strategic locations that store cache content. One of the main features of CDN is that it ensures that your website loading time remains the same, regardless of your users’ location to that server, therefore reducing the world wide wait. CDN will also help to speed up your website in different countries, but to remain focused on your target audience, pick a hosting provider only in the country whose traffic you are targeting.
This way, you will make sure that your website will load faster in that country, due to the server’s IP, and search engines bots will determine the location of your server.
Several tools are available to help optimize your website and e-commerce. They usually work by scanning your website’s content. Then, the information is compared against the SEO influencing aspects of your website to give it a score. After, our tools will go a step further and will provide strategies to help you improve your ranking on popular search engines.
SEO experts will also analyse your website’s structure to determine if it is in the form that can be understood by search engines. Have specialists take a look at your website whether characteristics of your content such as meta-titles and meta-descriptions can be read and seen clearly by all search engines.
Furthermore, with the right SEO tools, you can submit your website to search engines. Once your website or e-commerce are listed, a process that can take several weeks, you can use SEO tools to compare how you rank on the different search engines based on relevant keywords.
Like security, SEO is something that needs to be worked on and done constantly. By having someone taking care of your website’s hosting solution, you can focus on having the right SEO tools to make sure that your content is optimized, relevant and interesting for your users.
If you have any questions about our hosting solutions, our services, and our prices, please feel free to contact us. Our expert team at Website Bunker will be happy to provide you with all the information you need.
We look forward to assisting you with all your website hosting needs.
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