Search Engine Optimization has come a long way and is always changing from time to time. Of course, traditional link building and keyword optimization are still important tools when it comes to improving the ranking of your website, but what about how you host your website?
If you own a website, one thing that you should know is that hosting your site with an excellent hosting company can be beneficial in a variety of ways. You can get increased traffic to your site, better rankings, and positive feedback from your customers and visitors. Let’s have a deeper look at how web hosting can affect the search engine rankings of your website:
1. User Experience Is Everything
No web user wants to waste their time trying to view content from a site whose pages take ages to load. That’s why it’s imperative that you invest in creating a website that can load pages in the least time possible. One of the techniques that have delivered great results in this area is the First Meaningful Paint technique, which aims to ensure that a page loads the most important content before loading additional content.
With such a concept, a website visitor will not simply bounce back to the search engine making it look like they did not find the information that they needed. If your pages load informative content quickly enough, Google may recognize such positives, hence boost your website. It goes without saying that the content on your website should be valuable to your intended audience for the best results. Fast loading speeds are not beneficial if the content is trash to your target audience.
Once you’ve created meaningful content, you can then host your site with a company that facilitates fast loading to enhance user experience. Keep in mind that Google pays attention to different types of load times when determining a website’s efficiency, and these load times are greatly affected by your choice of web hosting company.
2. Uptime Is Vital
Nothing frustrates web users more than trying to access a website only to get the feedback that the site is offline. Such a situation accounts for bad user experience, and it’s these kinds of situations that cause Google to penalize websites in terms of rankings.
As such, you should strive to ensure that your website is always available to users whenever they need it. One of the main factors that affect the level of uptime of your website is the hosting company whose services you choose to use.
Additional Ideas For Better Load Speeds And User Experience
There are various things that you can do to ensure that visitors who access your site enjoy the best experience, as discussed below:
A. Use Managed Hosting
You can reduce the amount of effort that you have to put into your website’s administration by using managed hosting. This is the kind of web hosting whereby a web host is the one tasked with ensuring that a site is functioning optimally.
In managed hosting, the host takes care of things such as making backups, updating software, and creating security patches so that you are left with enough time to create engaging content for your visitors.
B. Get The Best Coding Team
A poorly coded website hosted by the best company in the industry still does not offer a great user experience. For this reason, you should get a coding team that uses clean and light code which complies with W3C standards. That way, your website will load better and display the content better. A good coding team will get rid of all bugs that result in slow loading speeds.
C. Monitor Your Website Performance Regularly
Testing your website for performance issues can go a long way towards ensuring that you solve issues that can lead to poor user experience in a timely manner. There are lots of tools such as GTMetrix, Lighthouse, Yslow, Pingdom, and others that come in handy whenever you want to gauge your site’s performance.
D. Keep Your Site Secure
A secure website will save you from disappointment such as a hacker adding malicious links to your website. Besides, security issues linked to your website will ruin the user experience and result in the lowering of your website’s rankings. For this reason, you should make the effort of investing in a good security strategy that will ensure the optimal performance of your site.
In Summary
There are lots of things that you can do to ensure a good ranking of your site on search engines like Google. Choosing a good web host is one of those things. Not only will it improve your rankings, but can also lead to positive feedback and better profits if you are using your site for business.