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Many business owners take web hosting very lightly, without realizing the impact it can have on their website’s SEO rankings.

Many of them think only about the price when choosing their web hosting provider, which can turn out to be one of the biggest mistakes they can make, since there are a number of other things to consider as well.

A good web hosting provider can affect your website’s SEO in a number of ways and, while it is not guaranteed that it will boost your SEO rankings, it can certainly help you a great deal with reaching your SEO goals faster, which is definitely not the case with low-quality web hosting.

Therefore, you need to do your research and find a web hosting provider that will offer you the best services for your needs.

You need to remember that you get what you pay for, so finding a lower price must not be your main priority. It is important to consider a lot of different factors when choosing the right web hosting provider, such as uptime, speed, backup services and many more that are crucial for the best performance and functionality of your website.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at how a good web hosting provider can affect your SEO rankings, so that you can gain some insight into its importance when choosing a provider that suits your needs.

What Does Web Hosting Actually Affect in Terms of SEO?

Web hosting affects certain rules that you need to apply in order toensure your website is visible to search engines. Namely, it affects your website’s performance, that is, speed, your website’s availability or uptime and your website’s security. Read on to learn how web hosting impacts each one of those factors.

The Speed of Your Website

Your website’s speed is one of the most important factors that greatly affect your website’s SEO rankings. You need to have a website that loads quickly in order to improve your SEO and provide your visitors with better user experience. If it takes longer for your website to load, the visitors are very likely to leave and move on to another site, so load time is extremely important.

Good website speed can lead to a lot more conversions, so you need to make sure your web hosting provider offers you great speed.

A quick and responsive website can rank higher in search engines, so you need to choose a web hosting provider that has high-quality hardware and a quality data centre infrastructure.

However, the coding and configuration of your website itself can also make it slow to load if not set up correctly.

If you are certain that your website is optimized and all the technical stuff is properly set up, then you must contact your web hosting provider and demand that they either fix the problem or move your website to another server.

The Availability of Your Website

If your website keeps going down, its load time doesn’t really make a difference. If that happens often and your website’s downtime is long, your SEO rankings will certainly drop.

Google and other search engines will not redirect the users to your website if it is constantly unavailable. Your website’s uptime is extremely important, as it can not only help you boost your SEO rankings, but can boost your reputation as well.

Your web hosting provider must have fast servers and provide you with at least 99.9% network uptime, so that you don’t lose your customers and your traffic. If your website goes down, your web hosting provider must be able to fix the problem as quickly as possible to ensure your website stays accessible.

Your Website’s Security

Hackers are constantly searching for new ways to upload malicious malware into servers and the security of your website is incredibly important.

Your web host must provide you with the best security for your site, as having a vulnerable website susceptible to security breaches can lead not only to the loss of income and identity theft, but also to your business developing a bad reputation.

When choosing your web hosting provider, you must take several factors into consideration. You need to find out if your web host offers SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol), which secures your files and protects them from being intercepted and modified.

You also need to see if your web host has a SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate, as it is very important for your website’s security. An SSL certificate encrypts the path between a web server and a browser.

This is extremely important if you have an e-commerce website, since SSL will protect sensitive information, such as your customers’ credit card numbers, their banking numbers, their names and other personal information. Therefore, SSL is an absolute must for the security of your website.

Another factor to consider when choosing your web hosting provider is backup. Your web host must backup their servers regularly, as well as provide you with a tool that will enable you to backup your website on your own.

Server maintenance is also crucial when it comes to the security of your website, as it can protect it from security breaches. You need to check if your web host provides a published security protocol, which will show if they are up-to-date with the latest patches and upgrades.

How to Choose an SEO-friendly Web Host?

In order to choose an SEO-friendly web hosting provider, you need to do thorough research and find the one that best fits your needs. You need to take into consideration the time a certain web host has been in business, since experience matters a lot when it comes to providing your website with the best services.

There is a lot of competition on the market, so there are a number of web hosting providers out there that offer low-cost services of the highest quality. Reputation is very important as well, so make sure you go online and check the reviews for different web hosts to find out what their customers have to say about their services.

The SEO rankings of your website are crucial for your business, so you need to ensure the web hosting provider that you eventually opt for can provide you with all the aforementioned factors essential for improving your SEO rankings, thus helping you boost your reputation and grow your business.

If it takes more than 5 seconds for your visitors to figure out what is it that your company does, I believe that it is high time to reconsider the layout of your website.

Your website should have proper hosting and it should be set up so that it can clearly “communicate” with your audience and tell them what your company does and how and why you do it.

If your bounce rate is high, then your problems probably lie in the key elements of your website.

A high bounce rate on your website is a warning sign that something is not right with it, one possible answer being that you are not sending the right message or that this message is not quite in line with the services or products you are providing.

Here are some simple and effective tips you need to follow to make sure that your website is going in the right direction.

Create a Plan

The most important thing is to first create a plan. Don’t just immediately do a redesign of your website.

You need to make sure that it meets the needs of your visitors, so recreate a customer’s journey from them first visiting your site to them becoming a customer.

What are the pages they are viewing, what content are they reading and what are the things they are going to pay attention to. All of this will help you in designing your website in such a way that it effectively turns a good deal of your visitors into customers.

Clear Out All the Clutter

Some elements that are on your website may be distracting the visitors from the message you are trying to get across. Consider removing any complicated animations you might have on your website, because they can be causing it to load slower.

Visitors have a short attention span, so don’t give them a reason to leave your website. Media and animations on your website should be there only to support your well-written content.

Another important element that should not find its place on your website is unnecessary jargon and too many buzzwords with no real meaning. No one likes it and it makes the visitors roll their eyes, so avoid the words like, cutting edge, next gen, mission critical, because those words are out there on thousands of other websites.

Sharing

You should include social sharing and follow buttons on your website so that it would be easy for your visitors and audience to share and follow the content you have displayed.

Include this on every page of your website – landing pages, homepage, blog and even on your newsletter and marketing emails.

Good Photos

The photos that you are going to use on your website often do not go with the message you are trying to convey to your visitors, and even though this has been said too many times before – do not use stock photos.

These photos will not look professional, as the photos on your website are supposed to be representing the people that are employed in your company and your corporate spirit.

Make photos of your office and your employees, capture them when they are doing their everyday tasks, like talking on the phone or working on something at their desks.

Work On Improving Navigation

Your website should be able to facilitate a positive user experience, so simple and intuitive navigation plays a key role in good website design.

First, identify how long the visitors stay on your website. Make it easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for. Your visitors can easily switch to your competitor’s website, if they need a map to get around yours.

All in all, it is all about being found, and your site should be SEO friendly, so that you can improve your online presence.

Develop an SEO strategy and take into consideration all the search keywords that your potential customers will type in when searching for the services or products your company offers. Also, develop a strategy for creating quality content that will be relevant to your visitor’s needs, like blog articles and videos. You should ensure that your website is backed up with a good hosting solution with excellent up times, so that you don’t find yourself losing traffic because your website is down.

I hope that you will find these tips useful and that they will help you when improving the overall design of your website.