Right now, Google has over 200 considerations when measuring and ranking your website. Your hosting plan plays a huge role in this and it’s important you don’t let hosting-related stuff affect your website. Therefore, we’re sharing 5 ways in which your hosting plan can affect your website’s growth.
How your hosting plan can affect SEO
No matter the size of your website, you need to choose the right hosting plan. With tons of web hosting options available, you need to know what to look at. Consider the following factors:
1. Site speed
Site speed is the biggest factor to consider when choosing a web hosting plan. Not only for your ranking in Google but also for user’s convenience: no one wants to wait after a click. The faster your website loads, the smarter Google thinks you are.
2. SSL certificate
Due to an increasing amount of cybercrime, trust is becoming more and more important. This makes having an SSL certificate is a necessity for good ranking in Google. An SSL certificate encrypts the connection between your server and the user’s browser.
Who wants to enter a website when their browser detects a potential risk? No one. If potential visitors do not trust your website, Google will also not trust it.
3. Server’s environment and uptime
The physical location of your server influences the performance of your website, which in turn influences your ranking. One important factor to consider when it comes to your server is uptime. Uptime indicates how reliable the system is. It’s a percentage showing the time your website works, without crashing or having to reboot. An uptime of 100% doesn’t happen often, but it should be as close to that as possible.
A lower uptime can mean that users won’t have a good experience, which is one of Google’s priorities. If your website doesn’t work as it should, it can mean that you’ll lose users for that time period, that users will get the ”404 webpages not found” or that users won’t find what they need. In these cases, Google will not hesitate to throw you from the first search results page.
4. Disk space
Disk space is something important to consider when choosing a hosting company. Disk space is the space you get on a server to store your website’s data. To make a good decision, you need to know the size of your website and how much disk space you will need. It’s always good to go for a bigger plan, to allow your website to grow.
If the disc space isn’t enough, your site’s content will overflow and it might crash.
5. Backups
Safety first! We all know that we run a risk on the internet. Cybercrime is happening more and more often: websites get hacked, data loss happens all the time, brand’s reputations get destroyed and leakage of personal info is a regular problem.
In order to protect yourself from this (and more), a great back-up plan is necessary. With a great back-up routine, you can recover fast and shield your Google ranking.
Conclusion
Your hosting plan can influence your SEO in many ways. The most important thing to keep in mind when creating a website and choosing a hosting provider is user experience. User experience is one of the most important factors in determining your Google ranking. A good user experience means that your website loads fast, that it shows relevant content & that it works almost 100% of the time.
