Whenever people talk about SEO, web hosting always comes into the picture. Most of the people forget that hosting affects your search engine rankings.
In SEO’s world, there are only a few slots which matter in SERP, and thousands of webmasters compete to be on top at Google.
SEO optimization and hosting data can do a lot to improve your search engine rankings. It’s true that not all hosting services are equal. If some are a good value for money, then some aren’t.
However, your hosting plays a huge role in the page speed. Suppose a visitor comes to your site; first, their browser requests your site’s server for the page, then your server fetches the right data.
“Anyway, if a page takes more time to load due to a bad host, this is very bad for SEO.”
Therefore, choosing the best hosting plan is necessary for your SEO strategy.
How Can A Host Affect Your SEO?
Server Speed
Servers come in both cheap and expensive versions. Some hosts invest in the latest servers, while other hosting providers buy cheaper, older, and lower performance servers.
Many hosts are offering SSD storage space that performs certain common server operations which are faster than standard HDDs and increases server speed.
Caching
The world of plugins offers simple tools to take care of caching. WordPress’s caching plugin is WP Super Cache, which is free! Simply, server caching allows storing versions of popular pieces in the content for faster retrieval.
This will prevent servers from assembling the data from scratch each time. Thus, the benefit is that caching brings depends upon the complexity and popularity of webpages.
Industry’s leading hosts who care about server speed have built their own proprietary caching systems which are always prominently featured on the hosting plan details at their sites.
Scalability
The website receives heavy traffic, and issues of scalability come into play. Moreover, you don’t want the load speeds to slow or crawl once you get more search traffic. So, the better your server handles this extra traffic, the more scalable site you have.
Your host’s infrastructure impacts the scalability on certain types of plans such as virtual private servers (VPSs). Some hosts scale up the number of resources for your site to handle the traffic and keep the site performance better in the factor of scalability.
Available Resources
Every time someone visits your site, a page loads! The data in the page gets transferred from your servers to their browser. This is how the bandwidth is consumed without your information.
If your hosting plan offers you a very limited amount of bandwidth, then that’s quite bad for your site’s performance. Once you hit this limit, the data transfer speed shuts down entirely while affecting your SEO.
Content Distribution Network (CDN)
A CDN has data centres and their servers. A CDN typically have data centres all around the world, in different locations; thus, using it with your site lets you store content in those data centres.
When someone visits your website and requests that content, this CDN delivers it from the closest data centre resulting in the fastest loading time to the visitor.
It easy to use a CDN with any website, regardless of the host. However, if hosts offer free CDNs and integrate them easily, prefer to look at such hosting plans.
“A 99% uptime means that your site is down 7 hours per month, while a 99.9% uptime means it is about 44 minutes.”
Without a doubt, WordPress is one of the most excellent SEO tools, and almost all hosting plans come with some website builder. Hence, a host gives popular content management systems (CMSs) to customers like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, OpenCart, Magento, etc.
Which Hosting Plan Is Best For SEO?
Most hosting providers offer a variety of hosting plans, and if you’re not technically knowledgeable in web development, then it can get confusing.
The right plan depends a lot upon your project. Before Aashkrita breaks down each hosting type in more significant details, let’s take a quick look at the following hosting plans supporting SEO.
- Shared Hosting: If you have just started with small sites, then shared hosting plan is perfect. It’s the cheapest and basic hosting plan geared towards small businesses and hobbyists.
- Virtual Private Server (VPS) For SEO: It is the next level up in terms of performance and the cost. With VPS, we share servers with other customers. The difference is that you have a certain amount of resources, and others have a certain amount of resources dedicated to sites.
- Dedicated Servers For SEO: A dedicated server is all yours. You can put as many sites as you’d like on it. Again, the quality varies significantly on the specific plan and the hosting services.
Unless you have hundreds, thousands, or millions of visitors a month, the dedicated server is best for SEO. The hosting service you choose determines how successful your SEO efforts can become. It impacts your site’s credibility thus choose hosting plan wisely by keeping all these thoughts in mind.
