SEO-Friendly Hosting in 2024: 4 Things to Look for

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A hosting company can generally have an essential role in your overall ranking possibilities on the SERPs. To make your quest a lot easier for you to find the best possible hosting company, below, we go into depth about how hosting affects your rankings and what defines an SEO-friendly hosting company.

Choosing an SEO-Friendly hosting firm can seem complex. With a large number of companies that are currently circulating online, whom do you pick? Hosting needs to be reliable and high performing for your websites to reap the benefits from it.

When choosing the right hosting company for SEO purposes, you should research the following – the total up and downtime of the server, the overall speed the hosting can provide (server response time and TTFB – time to first byte, etc.), and its location. Each of these factors included within your hosting company will play a significant role in how well your website ranks in Google.

Illustration showing hosting figures

Does Hosting Affect SEO?

In simple words, yes. The hosting company you choose will affect where your website could rank in search engines. However, choosing a state-of-the-art hosting company doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll boost your rankings. But what it can provide is a massive decrease in web hosting, causing negative issues to your SEO.

The three main influences on whether or not a hosting company is good for you are its up and downtime, the speed it can provide, and its server’s official location. This may sound confusing at first, but let me explain why.

  • Uptime/downtime – Making sure you choose a hosting company with good uptime statistics is significant. If your hosting experiences a lot of downtime, this means your website is inaccessible for search engine spiders meaning they cannot rank your website.
  • Speed (core web vitals) – Speed plays a huge role in where your website gets ranked, and hosting can significantly impact this. However, load speed isn’t solely down to hosting, and it could result from poorly optimized images and video on your website.
  • Location – Something that many website owners are unaware of is that the server’s location has an impact on its SEO-friendliness. But it makes sense. If a US-based user searches for a query, it’ll more than likely bring up US-based websites. When Google searches for the search term, they’re looking for hosting servers that are in the UK as these will give the user a much better experience.

What Defines an SEO-Friendly Web Host?

The best type of SEO-friendly hosting will be a reliable one in the real world, something that doesn’t experience any downtime and can offer immense speeds. Although these can exist, it really depends on the user’s requirements, location, and much more. Below we go into detail about the four things you should look for when choosing a hosting company.

1. Core web vitals / faster load time

Speed plays a vital role in the overall rankings of a website on search engines. Even more than ever since Google announced a page experience update that has been implemented in June 2021. This algorithm update includes a factor called “Page Experience” which includes current signals and Google’s Web Vitals, which means that optimizing for good Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), First Input Delay (FID), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is going to be crucial. Each of these elements can be aided with good web hosting based on the following criteria.

2. High Uptime Guarantee

Without a doubt, your hosting company must have a high uptime guarantee. Down and uptime plays a considerable role in SEO as they considerably affect the possibilities of your website being crawled by search spiders.

For those who don’t know, uptime is simply the amount of time your website is accessible due to hosting. The longer your website experiences uptime, the more chances search engines can crawl your website. If you experience downtime and a user sees your page, they’ll quickly head back over to the search engine to find other websites, which can dramatically hurt your rankings.

If you want to invest your money wisely in a good hosting company, I recommend you choose a host that has nothing less than a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee. Be aware that some companies will promise 100 percent uptime. This isn’t feasible as all hosts will experience downtime one way or another. But as a rule of thumb, the higher percentage of uptime, the reduced chances of your SEO being affected.

3. Server Location

Sever location also plays a role in the selection process of your hosting company. If you’re on a virtual private server (VPS) or a dedicated server hosting plan, your website will have an official “home” instead of being on something like cloud hosting.

When choosing a hosting plan, please take into consideration your target audience and their location. For instance, if your audience is based in the United Kingdom, it’ll be more ideal to find a hosting company that homes servers in the UK.

4. Other Options (Auto Backups, SSL, etc.)

When choosing a hosting company, you’ll probably be advertised many additional extras. Although you may think they’re just trying to get more money from you, some of these extras can increase the SEO-friendliness of your website. These include:

  • SSL certificates – You need to make sure your host supports SSL. HTTPS has been a ranking factor in many search engines since the beginning of time. This is because it suggests to Google that your website is secure.
  • Automatic backups – Something else you may want to consider is opting in for automatic backups. If anything were to become corrupt with your website, which ultimately wipes everything, most hosting companies would offer automatic backups for free or added cost.
  • Hosting plans – In due time, I can imagine your website will grow. That’s great news, but the likely hood of your old plan suiting the new amount of traffic is highly unlikely. If you get to this point, you may want to consider investing in your own dedicated server.

Conclusion

Choosing a web hosting company can seem worrying at first, but it just requires a small amount of research, so you’re able to grasp a general understanding of what they can provide. Although the budget does play a role in most of our options, there are still some great alternatives out there that can offer remarkable hosting. Before making the initial investment, remember to always search for reviews on that given hosting provider. This will help clarify if everything they’re promoting is legit.

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Emir E.
Emir E.
I've been working in the digital marketing space since 2012. My main focus is SEO consulting, helping businesses improve their search engine rankings and drive more website traffic.