After a humongous drill down of thousands of sites, our experts have figured out 7 Major Ways your hosting plan can affect SEO in 2020. In this report, we’ve thrown light on the facts, after considering which, you can definitely bring betterment to your Google rankings!
Following are those 7 ways!
- Site Speed
- SSL Certification
- Reliable Backup
- High Performing Server Environment
- Server Uptime
- Proper Caching of Your Website
- Sufficient Disc Space
In the year 2020, Google has over 200 considerations on which they measure your website and rank them accordingly. Especially after the Google Core Update that recently shoot on 5 May, Google added several new factors to measure your SEO efforts.
Your hosting plan has the biggest role to play than it ever had to!
We can clearly see how much emphasis Google has laid on your website’s speed, user’s convenience & safety, etc.
If you want to attain enough payback from your SEO approach, better don’t let “hosting-related elements” affect your website! Be knowledgeable and act smartly while selecting a hosting plan!
We’ve described all considerable ways your hosting plan affects your website’s growth and provided a comprehensive guide regarding what sort of hosting is going to highly help you out in SEO!
Hang on with us for crucial details to make your website shine bright!
7 Major Ways your hosting plan can affect SEO in 2020
No matter what’s your site’s size, and what are the overall traffic levels, you need to be perfect in choosing the right hosting plan and deeply understand the requirements.
In today’s date, you find tons of web hosting options, which can baffle anyone! If we look deeply – “the more you pay, the better you get” factor doesn’t prove to be 100% true here!
It might happen that the basic plan of a given web hosting is providing better results than the mid-price plan of the other! How will you figure out which hosting plan will work out the best for you? What are the bigger considerations of Google chained to your hosting?
After cherishing the following 7 factors, it won’t be a mystery for you anymore!
1) Site speed: The Biggest Factor To Consider
Undoubtedly, the top-ranked among the Ways your hosting plan can affect SEOis the site speed, which has always been a major factor for Google rankings, but now, things are much more critical than what they used to be ever in the past. We all want speed on our website, as the thumb rule says – “faster your web page loads, smarter you are in the eyes on Google!”
Website Speed Statistics in 2020: All you need to know!
Here’s the summary:
- PageSpeed Insights Score: 44
- First Input Delay (FID): 242 milliseconds
- First Contentful Paint (FCP): 2.9 seconds
- Time To Interactive (TTI): 2.6 seconds
- Time To First Byte (TTFB): 3.7 seconds
What do these metrics scream? With a slow or average web hosting, achieving high PageSpeed Insights scores is impossible. No matter how hard you try your tactics regarding data compression, installing plugins, doing configurations, etc., you’ll fail in bringing speed to your site!
PageSpeed Insights Score
Experts exclaim that the Google PageSpeed Insights Score isn’t accurate, and they are true also! Does Insight Score matter? Yes, it does, and if your site is doing well on other speed measuring sites, including Pingdom, GT Metrix, etc. then you’ll attain good results on Google PageSpeed Insights as well.
On PC, you can exceed the average PageSpeed Insights Score, which is 44, but on mobile, it’s very challenging with a slow web hosting.
It’s calculated considering numerous factors, and if you’re left behind in any major factors like caching, optimizing, etc. you won’t do well here. A good web hosting solves all that for you! We’ll deeply cherish that further in this guide.
Time to Interactive (TTI)
TTI is the time it takes for your page’s content to become ready for any user to begin interacting with it. This is a crucial metric to figure whether your content is dynamic. Google ensures that its users have appreciably fast experiences on the web. In case your TTI is huge, you’re rankings will drop. Google exclaims 2.6 seconds as the average TTI.
First Contentful Paint (FCP) and First Input Delay FID
FCP is the time when the browser supplies the first content bit from the DOM (API interface), dispensing the first feedback to the user regarding the actual loading of the page. 2.9 seconds is the average FCP.
FID measures the time duration of a user’s first interaction with your site, meaning when they click on something to the browser’s responding time to the interaction.
Time To First Byte (TTFB)
TTFB measures the duration from your client, making an HTTP request to the page’s first byte of the being obtained by the client’s browser.
As per Google’s May 2020 Core Update for the TTFB limit is set to 4 seconds maximum limit. In case it exceeds, your SEO receives affect! You might have already got the warning from Google WebMaster after this update if your site is lacking in the TTFB department.
If your web hosting provides slow speed, attaining the secure zone of below 4 seconds FCP in mobile is next to impossible. Remember, plugins can’t help here! Your web hosting plan is playing the biggest role! 4-second FCP is something at what most of the websites are struggling, but certainly not those who have a fast hosting plan!
How important is the website’s speed?
We’ve put website speed at the top of 7 Major Ways your hosting plan can affect SEO list due to several big reasons. Following are the factors describing why website speed should be your priority always:
User’s convenience
Now, that’s the reason why Google keeps on launching minor and major updates now and then. For user’s convenience, your website (or individual web pages) definitely needs to load faster, as no one prefers hanging around after a click.
No matter what’s your website’s niche, if your competitor’s pages are loading faster than you, boom, you are out of the race, no matter your content is better!
No matter how well you’ve narrated, but if it’s not opening within the time limit, the user willingly waits, what’s the benefit of content to that user? Absolutely nothing!
Regarding loading speed, Google says that if your site is loading within 5 seconds, it’s acceptable. However, in 2020, your result certainly needs to load within 4 seconds! That implies all the devices, no matter a PC, tablet, or smartphone!
In addition to that, if you own an e-commerce website, then the loading time should be within 3 seconds, and if it exceeds, you lose 40% of visitors, and that’s a huge number! So, if you are ensuring the user’s convenience regarding speed, you’re a “good boy” in Google’s eyes!
Bounce rate
If we’re discussing the Major Ways your hosting plan can affect SEO, and we cannot skip the “bounce rate” factor here. Slow web hosting definitely increases your site’s bounce rate.
Even if you’re following tons of good practices, a high bounce rate can destroy your plans of getting your website highly successful. As per thumb rule, a 26% to 40% bounce rate is amazing, while 41% to 55% is considered as the “acceptable channel.”
In case your site’s bounce rate exceeds that limit, then it’s a big concern. You might hear folks explaining methods to cover bounce rate, but the truth is your bounce rate supremely depends upon your website speed, then come other supportive factors.
If the user performs a zero second session (clicks your result and doesn’t wait for your result to open), it’s considered a bounced session. Now, if the loading exceeds 5 seconds, there’s no way you can cover your bounce rate!
Even if the user enters your primary result, he won’t be able to navigate well through the interlinks that you’ve provided. This affects all sorts of websites!
Earning factor
Slow speed directly affects your earning, as when you are already losing your visitors, your website’s gross is going to decrease for sure. It’s like participating in a boxing match with one arm at the back.
Low returns can affect any business. Acquire a good hosting plan, get your loading speed around 3 seconds, and notice how your leads increase. Many big businesses have experienced this scenario.
For instance, Amazon figured out that in case their page load slowdown of only one second, it will cost a decrease of $1.6 billion every single year. Isn’t that a bewildering figure?
So, spending a bit extra on a reliable hosting acts as a great payback. After all, why sacrifice your leads when you can overcome the issue just by switching to a reliable hosting.
2) SSL Certificate: A Necessity For Ranking Improvement
In SEO, an SSL certificate is a huge factor that decides the improvement or deterioration of your site’s ranking. Due to the increment in the cases of fraud, trust matter s a lot online in current time.
Who prefers entering a result if their browser reads a “potential risk?” Now, if the user isn’t trusting you, then Google will also not trust you, and you never want that! If the user lacks trust in your site, you won’t be able to sell anything at all! Your brand will definitely not survive for long.
Installing an SSL certificate on your site proves to be the smartest move here! It encrypts the connection between your user’s web browser and your server.
This further leads to secure exchange of personal information. Adding on further, since 2014, Google is considering SSL certification as an important ranking factor.
3) Reliable Backup: Safety First
It’s true that you are surviving with a thousand risks on the internet. A small loophole exposes your website to hackers or other naughty elements on the internet, and worst can happen after that! Here’s a small list that makes you tremble!
- Your site can be hacked.
- You can face the loss of data.
- Your website’s or brand’s reputation gets destroyed (rebuilding the reputation sometimes takes years).
- A leakage of your personal info can occur.
- You may miss your goals and cross deadlines in the absence of reliable backup.
Now you know, why reliable backup is among the 7 Major Ways your hosting plan can affect SEO in 2020?
One of the biggest advantages of purchasing a reliable hosting plan is that you enjoy daily backups of your data. Of course, you can use certain plugins for backups, buy then the hassle is of performing the whole backup process manually.
Even with the most trusted backup plugins, backup download failing issue takes place, and that’s pretty exasperating. Getting automatic backup in your cPanel isn’t just more reliable, but pretty luxurious also, isn’t it?
A web hosting with routine backup can pull you out of the worst scenarios! Fast recovery from such scenarios with backup is a pleasure that can’t be defined! You can shield your Google rankings that you’ve attained after much hard work.
4) High Performing Server Environment
The physical location of the server directly affects the performance of your website, especially the speed. Closer, the physical location of your web server is to your user, better the loading speed and overall performance is going to be.
Does that influence your rankings? Yes, more than you expect!
For those using cloud hosting, this isn’t a big concern, but for those who roll on with VPS, shared, or dedicated server, considering the major Ways your hosting plan can affect SEO, your server’s physical location is a top concern!
Before spending on web hosting, figure out where does the majority of your site’s traffic comes from. After that, go on with the server that’s physically situated in that country. Now, every server in the same country won’t provide speed. It depends!
If you choose a reliable web hosting service, with servers in most of the parts of the world, it’s highly beneficial for you, as no matter from where your traffic is coming, your website’s overall speed statistics will be pleasing.
Certainly, if you’re getting integrated CDN along with a high performing server environment, you’ll attract (and retain) your website’s users from the whole world! If your website’s speed is below the max limit set by Google across various nations, it’ll better your rankings!
5) Server’s Uptime
Uptime is an estimate of system reliability, indicated in the percentage of time your website, without crashing, or requiring to be rebooted for maintenance or administrative purposes. In simpler words, it’s the amount of time a server has stayed running.
No matter what hosting you’ve chosen, you won’t get 100% uptime assurance, but this percentage needs to be as close to 100% barrier as possible. If you want to stay competitive in your niche, the Server’s uptime matters a lot.
For keeping your website users joyous, your website needs to be online for maximum time. In case your website goes offline, you’re definitely going to lose your users for that time period, and furthermore, loose leads.
If there’s a user needing some info (or wants to purchase something) form your site, and he comes across the “404 webpages not found” issue, it proves to be annoying. In case your website returns online just after a few moments, that’s fine, but if it’s offline for longer, that will harm your rankings, and much more!
As we’ve discussed, Google’s priority is user’s experience, and if your search result is somewhere on the top, but bringing no good to the user, Google won’t hesitate in throwing your result to the second or third page!
Hence, uptime matters a lot, and for that, your host provider’s technical team needs to be dynamic and super responsive! We’ve formed a list regarding why uptime maintenance is crucial in current time!
Client satisfaction
Yes, we’ll keep that on top always! No matter what operation Your clients are a part of, they expect efficient and professional transportation. For getting things done safely and smoothly, and concentration on the sake of your Google rankings, you need to avoid lengthy System downtime.
If your website is offline for long, certain jobs can remain incomplete or might arrive late. That highly causes customer loss, and of course, lack of trust. You might be investing much in your digital marketing campaigns, but a lengthy downtime (or a slow-loading website) and spoil everything.
No matter you’ve implemented your ideas correctly, and are full of confidence regarding attaining positive results, you can’t expect results if your server isn’t providing rapid uptime facility.
On the one hand, you have to hire professionals for monitoring your server uptime, while on the other hand, your server looks upon the uptime by itself! What sounds better? Obviously, the second option!
So, a good server plan keeps your systems running at their ultimate best. That way, your clients will have trust on your website, as they’ll be able to reap benefits whenever they want. Furthermore, you’ll attain maximum benefit form your marketing campaigns, and form the implementation of your SEO strategies.
Prevention of Security Breaches
Massive cyber attacks directly lead to compromise servers and various systems. Security breaches can be expensive, and these certainly damage your reputation, leads, etc. If your server’s uptime is not that good, trust us, you’ve invited the risk of cyber breaches.
Luckily, right monitoring your server uptime will certainly keep your data highly secure. That way, you can guard against fierce cyber breaches and also prepare yourself for taking the right action.
Getting Valuable Data
Among the biggest benefits of uptime maintenance for your website servers is the fact that it provides you with data on performance. Apprehending when your sites or systems are down will support you figure out why.
Now, once you’re familiar with the reason why downtime is occurring, you can perform impactful steps for ensuring more consistent uptime.
Thus, you’ll always have those tools you require for the improvement of your marketing strategies, management, and, most importantly, digital presence. Ensure your server uptime is monitored correctly for gathering the data you require to prosper as a company.
6) Proper Caching of Your Website
In our 7 Major Ways your hosting plan can affect SEO in 2020 countdown; we’re discussing another crucial part here. Proper caching of your website affects your SEO in a much bigger way than you think! Many times you are just doing all things right (regular audits of website, optimizing, compressing Java script.), but not getting your site load fast.
In such cases, it’s the caching issue! The cache keeps on gathering in some part of your C-panel, which gradually decreases your website’s speed. You need to perform manual caching every now and then, but a good hosting plan eliminates that hassle!
If you’re getting a built-in server caching with your hosting plan, it’s too beneficial. However, web hosts don’t provide with server generally caching for basic shared hosting. It’s so because it needs special architecture for making that happen.
So, what features you need your web server to provide for efficient caching? Let’s understand the sorts of popular server caching solutions first!
Varnish Cache on Shared Hosting
Varnish cache is an identical open-source web application accelerator to NGINX that’s popular as HTTP reverse-proxy. It has design qualities of speeding dynamic content. It’s meant for high-performance content delivery, and you attain the primary advantages of re-configuring it for matching your basic needs.
Numerous benefits are accrual if you’re provided with varnish cache by your web hosting plan on your account.
- Architecture
- Performance
- Flexibility
- Capabilities of caching timely data
- Varnish cache is perfectly threaded
- Additional advantages
Architecture
Do you know why online or web-based businesses preferring varnish cache? It’s due to its architecture. Varnish stores data in virtual memory in application programs and leaves the operations to decide what all gets stockpiled in the memory and what gets paged out from the disk of the operating system of the user to the caprices.
It’s a simple technique that highly supports you in avoiding the troublesome situation where your operating system begins caching dating. Further, such data moves to your disc by the app.
Performance
Performance is the biggest benefit of getting a web hosting loaded with Varnish caches is this application’s performance level. It’s high-end performance, design, and highly appreciable architecture, and it successfully delivers around 20 Gbps on normal hardware.
Further, it’s entirely capable of speeding your website’s performance 300-1000 times faster, isn’t that insane? Faster your internet connection is, the better you can reap out of Varnish cache.
Flexibility
If we discuss the salient factors attracting websites to use Varnish cache is its configuration language flexibility. It’s configuration language (known as VCL), permits users to write policies regarding how incoming request needs to be received and further, handled.
These policies generally feature instructions regarding alteration of requests and responses, what contents to serve, and form where to obtain such contents.
Besides that, several run-time parameters help to control variables’ limits, including threads, timeouts, etc. It accompanies highly appreciable command-line management interface permitting compilation, modifications as well as activating new VCL scripts without restarting.
Capabilities of caching timely data
As we mentioned, Varnish cache is a highly dependable HTTP accelerator, and that’s why so many high profile websites prefer using it. Neither cache gets accumulated, nor it slows your website speed.
Most importantly, it offers real-time statistics on an anonymous browser. For content-rich websites, caching timely data is a big concern and requirement. The capabilities of varnish cache tackles that well.
Varnish cache is perfectly threaded
With the thread availability at each level, Varnish cache’s performance is very consistent. There’s a distinct worker thread for managing the connection of every client when the max configuration touches the limit. It channels incoming connections to an overflow queue. Further, all incoming connections get rejected when the overflow queue configuration limit exceeds.
Additional advantages
Why is Varnish cache holding such priority and reputation in today’s date? Why we laid so much emphasis over varnish cache in our 7 Major Ways your hosting plan can affect SEO Guide? Reliability and affordability are the key factors!
Regarding caching heavily consumed APIs, you would definitely love to have Varnish cache in your web hosting plan. It’s certainly the most convenient web accelerators, even more than Apache and NGINX.
Contrasting to other proxy servers’ types, the list of advantages is bigger, and the level of convenience is higher. Varnish mainly supports HTTP, which is undoubtedly a supreme security protocol.
NGINX Cache on Shared Hosting
Talking about the popular server caching solutions, we can’t skip NGINX. NGINX can be utilized as a reverse proxy exactly like Varnish for caching dynamic pages. Certainly, it functions as a fully-developed web server. Integrate NGINX and Varnish with each other is possible. However, there’s isn’t any legitimate reason.
When you enable caching, NGINX saves responses in a disk cache, which it further uses to respond to your clients without needing to proxy requests for that same content every time.
LiteSpeed Caching
After the two major caching techniques we discussed, here comes LightSpeed caching, which is yet another dependable one, but not as much as Varnish Cache and NGINX Cache. LiteSpeed is Apache’s drop-in replacement, meaning that replacing one with the other is possible.
Certainly, applications shouldn’t be able to differentiate. Only a few hosting companies use LiteSpeed. In case you’re aggressively looking for a rapid improvement in your site’s load speed, just use LightSpeed caching, a sit comes with in-built server caching capabilities.
In case your old hosting plan doesn’t provide you with LightSpeed caching, and your new one does, you’ll definitely see an increment in your side’s speed when you perform tests on Pingdom, Google Speed Insights, GT Metrix, etc. That highly affects overall SEO!
7) Sufficient Disc Space
Moving to the last factor in our countdown of 7 Ways your hosting plan can affect SEO, here comes our 7th one. Especially those, who have not run any website yet might easily oversee this one!
Disc space is the space you get on any server to store your website’s content. Disc space is among the prominent features to consider with any hosting you’re going to acquire. Its concept is pretty fundamental.
Disc space offered by various web hosting companies highly differ. Sometimes, with the cheaper hosting plan, you get everything desired. However, just because of the less disc space offered, you have to move to an expensive one. Well, a smart marketing technique, though!
The disc space is divided among all the users (who all occupy the same plan), in case you’re rolling with a shared hosting plan. In some cases, hosting companies advertise of providing unlimited storage space, and those having less knowledge can easily be fooled here.
What’s the need here?
Firstly, you understand what’s the size of your website and how much disc space you need. Remember, go for extra space, as if in future, your website expands, you’ll be either asked to compress the data (which is too risky), or to move on to a better (Yes, an expensive one) plan.
Why do the hassle? Just measure your website’s disc usage. On that basis, you can acquire a hosting that provides disc storage meeting your demands.
In case you’ve hosted a website, knowing the disc usage (which is the database size of your website) is very simple. You can access the info form the C panel, or in case not familiar with the process, contact the hosting service, they’ll let you know!
Precaution is better than cure! Do consider the future size of your website. Keep an eye on the disc space usage. If your disc space doesn’t prove to be sufficient, your site’s content will overflow! Certainly, that’s a bigger issue than your imagination!
So, in our 7 Major Ways your hosting plan can affect SEO guide, we highly recommend to choose a web hosting plan with sufficient disc space, as while the data limit approaches toward the max disc space limit, your site’s speed keeps in decreasing.
7 Major Ways your hosting plan can affect SEO in 2020: The Conclusion
Evaluate your web hosting choices with the following factors:
- Does the host you’ve chosen have a high benchmark regarding performance? Do invest some time here!
- Do you have the flexibility of installing or purchasing an SSL certificate for your site? In case they’re providing it free (most good web hosting plans do include this today), then it’s very beneficial.
- Is your hosting plan, including a regular automated backup system?
- Can you select your data center location? If not, then does your hosting plan include a third-party or integrated CDN?
- Is your host guaranteeing a high site uptime? Does any guarantee back it up? Also, what type, and how fast technical support you’re getting.
If you deeply consider the above questions, finding a high-performing and reliable host will be easy. If your host fulfills all those needs, then certainly, it will support your rankings.
Overall, your host has a huge impact on your SEO. Genuinely, if you think that your rankings aren’t as high as they should be in contrast to your efforts behind that, you need to switch hosting!
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