When it comes to optimizing your website for search engines, a lot of factors come into play: link building, content creation, mobile-first indexing, sitemap, and so on.
There’s one thing that can make or break your efforts in SEO yet gets neglected quite often-web hosting. Web hosting plays a crucial role in defining the quality of the overall experience you deliver to visitors. In the absence of a reliable hosting service such as Go4hosting, your site may face timeouts, resulting in a high bounce rate-something that none of you would want.
A first-rate hosting service augments your organic efforts, leading to favorable organic performance of your site.
In this blog, we’ll dwell on the features that define an SEO-friendly web hosting service.
1) Network Uptime
We live in an era characterized by low attention spans and instant gratification. If users visit your website only to find it inaccessible, it would leave a bad impression on them. Also, no one would want to visit such a site again. Such goof-ups can adversely impact your search engine ranking.
And that’s why a dependable web hosting service is vital. They offer high network uptime-the time for which your site remains online and accessible. As a result, your site remains up and running for a long time.
For best results, choose a host with at least 99.9% uptime (or higher). 99.9% uptime means you will not have more than 8.8 hours of annual downtime. Having said that, you need to steer clear of web hosts claiming to offer 100% uptime. Websites need maintenance once in a while, so there is always going to be some downtime. The key lies in keeping it as low as possible so that your site runs smoothly with no impact on ranking.
2) Server Location
The location of your server directly affects the performance of your website. It decides how quickly your content becomes accessible to users.
If you are using a shared, dedicated, or cheap VPS server hosting, your website remains stored on a server in a data center somewhere. The data center should be as close as possible to the majority of your users. This will reduce the site loading time.
So, if most of your visitors are from India and your site is hosted on a cheap VPS server housed in Europe/USA, you might face performance issues. To avoid such a hassle, a server located nearby should be chosen.
3) Reviews
Thanks to the internet, we have reviews for every service we seek, be it an e-commerce store or a food joint. And web hosting is no exception. Hosting review platforms including the likes of Hostingreview.com offer reviews by actual users of a service and thus provide a sneak peek into the quality of service delivered.
It’s vital to remember that the nature of the hosting service is such that it attracts a large number of negative reviews. Clients complain even when their website goes down for just a couple of minutes. So, the best way to select a suitable service provider is to browse the lists of top hosting providers on the internet and read their reviews to assess if they are offering what you seek.
4) Technical Support
When you are running a website, things can go awry anytime. If your site has issues, or if you have questions, a team should be present to lend support regardless of when the issue comes up.
Premium service providers offer round-the-clock technical support through online and offline channels. This means you can reach them through any channel of choice: email, phone, and live chat.
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And with the advent of social media channels, web hosting providers tend to make support available through customer service pages on Twitter. When choosing a host, find out all the channels through which it delivers support.
5) Add-ons
In addition to providing hardware and software to host your website, hosting providers offer add-ons to reinforce the performance of your site. Here are some of the SEO-friendly services you should seek in a hosting plan:
- a) Automatic Backup: However robust your hosting solution may be, the risk of crashing is always there. Automatic backups keep your site immune to any such mishap.
- b) SSL: SSL certificate is a key ranking factor for Google. So, if you aren’t still using one for your website, ask your hosting provider to provide it.
Hope this post throws light on what kind of host provider you should choose in order to ace your SEO game. If you have questions on the same, scribble in the comment section. Thanks for reading.
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