Why your hosting plan might be sabotaging your search rankings
Your website hosting may not seem directly associated with your SEO rankings. Still, having a poor-quality hosting plan can quickly raise red flags for search engine crawlers and result in your search engine results page (SERP) positions dropping.
If your SEO efforts do not pay off, it might be time to evaluate whether your hosting plan is silently sabotaging all of your hard work.
Why your hosting plan could be undoing your SEO efforts
Since you can’t physically see it, it can be tricky to identify website hosting as a cause for your website rankings dropping.
Let’s discuss some of the main reasons that your hosting plan may be sabotaging your search rankings…
Page speed
Page speed is one of the most important ranking factors by Google since it has a huge impact on the user experience.
If your hosting plan uses outdated infrastructure or the servers are overloaded, this can cause the performance of your website to drop since response times are bound to be slower.
If people arrive at your website and it is slow to load, this can quickly leave them frustrated and lead them to look elsewhere to find what they need. In fact, as little as a one-second delay in page load time can result in an 11% drop in page views.
Since search engines prioritize the user experience, a high percentage of users bouncing off a website after just a few seconds is going to reflect on the site’s search performance.
A free website speed test will show you exactly how quickly different pages of your website load for users.
Limited bandwidth
Many of the budget hosting plans come with bandwidth limits, defining how much data can be transferred over the network at once. This means that with too many people on your website at any given time, it will run slowly and may even restrict access completely.
As your business grows and your website receives more traffic, having a hosting plan that you have outgrown can quickly become problematic.
Limited bandwidth can also result in indexing issues. If search engines experience slow loading times when crawling your site or they can’t access your pages at all, this will reflect in how your web pages are indexed.
Server location
The location of your server matters. If you are working within the UK, choosing a hosting provider with servers located in the US or Asia means data needs to travel long distances, slowing down the page load times.
Although this only affects speeds by milliseconds, often not even noticeable to users, it can be picked up when crawled by search engines.
For businesses operating on a global scale and receiving a high volume of traffic from all over the world, opting for a content delivery network will ensure that speed is not hindered.
Website downtime
If your hosting plan is unreliable and results in frequent downtime, this can quickly undo all of your SEO efforts and leave your customers frustrated.
You may not even notice that your website is experiencing downtime. In fact, 80% of businesses only find out about website downtime through customers emailing them or tagging them on social media.
However, when a search engine tries to crawl your website and finds it inaccessible, especially on more than one occasion, it will consider your site unreliable – or may even think it no longer exists. This will result in drops in search engine rankings and impact the volume of traffic you receive.
Security threats
As hackers and malware have become more advanced, the security on your website needs to be better than ever.
Firstly, a hacked website puts the confidential information of users at risk. Secondly, search engines will quickly flag the website as ‘Not Secure’ as they will not want to direct traffic to sites that have experienced security breaches – a problematic outcome that will leave users not wanting to click onto your page.
The hosting provider you choose determines how protected your website is from third-party threats. Every plan contains a different level of security features and if you opt for a lower-end package, it may mean that the responsibility lies fully with you.
How To Choose The Right Hosting Plan
If you are on the hunt for a new WordPress hosting provider that better aligns with the needs of your business and won’t hinder your SEO strategy, consider these factors:
- Hosting that grows with you. Even if a hosting provider ticks all of the boxes for now, consider if it’ll still be suitable as your business grows. Limits on resources such as CPU and storage may result in poor website performance as your website gains more traffic or faces spikes during peak periods.
- Daily backups. Plugins and updates can sometimes cause unexpected issues with a site, so regular backups are important to prevent data loss. If you face sudden problems, being able to quickly recover a recent version of the website will mean that search engines won’t see your site as unreliable.
- Additional security measures. To ensure that your website is as safe as possible against external threats, look for a hosting plan that includes thorough security features. Added layers of security, such as firewalls, DDoS protection, and malware scanning, will prevent future issues from causing damage.
- Access to 24/7 support. Whether you deal with unexpected downtime or a suspected security breach, being able to access technical support at all times will help minimise disruption.
Securing your SEO rankings through reputable web hosting
Many businesses fail to realize just how much importance lies in the hosting plan they choose. Although the hosting package itself doesn’t directly correlate with your SEO efforts, having an unreliable provider that is not designed for the scale of your website can quickly see search engine rankings drop.
By choosing a hosting plan that aligns with the needs of your business and ensuring that it is able to scale with your business as it grows, you can ensure that your website is in safe hands.
