5 Ways in Which Your Shared Hosting Impacts Your SEO
Search Engine Algorithm (SEO) is the holistic process of bringing organic traffic to a website and ranking it at the top of the search engine results. It is an established fact that web hosting does have an impact on the website’s quest to rank on the first page. However, many are of the opinion that Shared Web Hosting may have a detrimental effect on website SEO. In this article, we will try and break this misconception.
If you opt for the cheapest option available in the market or opt for free web hosting, it may have an adverse impact on your SEO. However, if you select the right website hosting provider with a robust Shared Server plan, then it may be beneficial for your site ranking as well.
Let us look at the top 5 ways in which your Shared Hosting can impact your SEO:
- Uptime Score: If your website is experiencing frequent downtime, it will act as a negative factor for your website’s SEO. Selecting a Shared Hosting plan that guarantees an uptime score of 99.9{f7ed030e6b66a105523929cc0a31feac8046c350dc75ade0c66885759a1a0e1f} is a good start. Nowadays, Shared Hosting plans come with a robust environment that ensures a reliable server availability for your website.
- Website performance: With the inclusion of website speed as one of the most important factors in determining the SEO ranking of a website, enhancing website performance has come to the fore. Shared Hosting has been traditionally associated with low site loading time. However, if you select the right hosting provider which allocates the right amount of resources for your website with fair-usage policy, then you can nullify the disadvantages commonly associated with Shared Hosting.
- Security: Google and other search engines take into consideration the security features of the website to rank websites. If a website’s security has been compromised then not only it damages the reputation of the business in the market, but also negatively impacts your SEO. On a Shared Server, all the websites share the same IP address. Therefore it is more vulnerable to cybersecurity breaches. On the other hand, a good hosting provider handles the server security diligently as multiple websites may be affected.
- Server Location: Although uptime score usually denotes the time period for which the website is accessible to the users, it is the location of the server that dictates how fast the data is communicated from the server to the user browser. If your website is hosted on a Shared Server, it is important to select the one which has its data centre nearest to your location. This can significantly reduce the time taken to process HTTP requests. Also, using a Content Delivery Network can help you store data in different parts of the globe so that the browser can fetch the data from a location nearest to the user.
- Additional SEO features: Some other features, such as having an SSL certificate, has a direct role to play in improving the site’s SEO. Of late, it has become more of a necessity than a luxury. So, selecting the Shared Hosting plan that comes with an SSL certificate can help your website climb up the SEO ladder.
Conclusion
Shared Hosting offers the most cost-effective plan for new website owners. However, it has come into disrepute with many people considering it as a negative SEO factor. However, with the best Linux hosting provider, it can be assured that even with a Shared Server, your website would not suffer in performance.