Your web host could be affecting your SEO

When it comes to optimising your e-commerce website, every little detail counts. Business owners spend a lot of time and effort on SEO practices, but neglect or fail to realise how their hosting provider may be hindering SEO efforts. Here is an explanation of how your web host could inadvertently be lowering your SEO ranking.

Low speeds

Website performance and loading speed directly affect the site’s user experience. Consequently, this effects on page SEO and its ranking. Poor speeds lead to poor user experience and lower the site’s ranking.

The hosting service needs to have adequate resources to handle your traffic and web content. The loading speed may also hinge on the hosting server’s location and the hosting plan. For instance, cloud hosting is not affected by the location. However, with a shared or dedicated localised server, the further your visitors are the longer the access time; unless the host integrates a content delivery network (CND) to improve access time.

Downtime

Your web host is directly responsible for maintaining the site’s availability online. Frequent server downtime should not be acceptable. Downtime affects the user experience and click-through rate (CTR), this is the ratio of users clicking to follow a link to the those who actually view the page. If the CTR ratio is too high, the ranking falls. Make sure your host can guarantee 100% uptime to help with your ranking.

Poor security

Web security is often overlooked as an SEO influence. Cybersecurity is a major concern with modern internet technology. Once the web host or website itself fails in combating penetration and manipulation, the server may be infected by malware. If malware and security breaches are not dealt with appropriately and quickly, the site may be blacklisted or de-indexed.

Hosting restrictions

Always read the finer details of a hosting plan to ensure you don’t sign up with an SEO-restrictive hosting provider. Many business owners make the mistake of failing to discuss their SEO needs with the host and to take into account the scalability of the website. You need to keep in mind that not all hosting services are SEO-friendly; some restrict a certain volume of traffic, reject the use of optimisation tools, plugins and limit SEO resources.

To ensure that your host does not restrict any of your SEO efforts, check that they allow the use of all the SEO resources you are currently using and that there is room to expand to more techniques in the future.

Conclusion

The web-hosting provider has a major influence in certain aspects of your website that directly or indirectly affect the SEO ranking. Host your site with a reliable service that will provide you with all the resources you need to optimise your website’s performance, availability and security. Excalibur Digital is one such hosting service.

Here at Excalibur Digital, we offer reliable and flexible hosting packages to keep you online without restricting any of your SEO efforts. Contact us and find out more about our hosting services and SEO solution.