With the current trend of people shifting to the internet as a lifestyle, businesses and even individuals have now recognized the need to have an active website and almost all businesses now have websites for their companies. However, most of these companies are not getting the returns on this investment. One of the main reasons is that their web visitor count is very low as a result of their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ranking being very low and they are thus not visible to search engines.
SEO ranking is what determines your prominence on the web and the fight for this prominence starts right from the time you choose a hosting company and a plan. Though there are other factors that affect a websites SEO ranking like analytics and the use of the right keywords, a website’s hosting company is a key player. It affects your site’s SEO ranking in the following way.
Search engines, such as Google, use robots to “crawl” through websites in order to access all the information on the site and then match it with adequate queries. The server speed of the web hosting company affects the site and page speeds. In return, the site’s speed affects the speed at which these robots crawl through the website. For sites with slow site speed, Google will not be able to deeply crawl your website and hence won’t find content to match to different queries.
On the other hand, page speed affects the rate at which all the content in a page on your website takes to load. This speed affects user experience that determines the amount of time a user stays on your site or if the visitor will visit another page on your site before leaving. Google refers this as time-on-site and bounce rate respectively and they are some of the metrics that it uses to measure user experience on your site. For instance, if a user requests a page on your site and it takes long to load, the most likely thing is that the user will click back to the search results page and click another site hoping that it will satisfy their need faster. This will results into very high bounce rates with low time-on-site for your website. If this happens severally, Google will note that your site is not satisfying its users and it will push your site lower in its search engine results pages. Speed is a factor that Google has explicitly affirmed that it affects your sites SEO ranking.
Though this is just but one of the several factors that affect your sites Search Engine Optimization in relation to web hosting, it should give you an insight into the fact that the company that you choose to host your website with should not be chosen by considering only the plans and packages they have.
If you are new to the web, check out https://firstsiteguide.com to discover important information about any website and analyze technologies they use and how well they perform.