Does hosting influence SEO?

[PenguinManiac]

Each hosting company has different servers, which can have different location, speed, bandwidth and so on. It stands in reason to believe that such features could influence a website's performance, and thus its ranking on search engines, but is it really so? Does the hosting company you choose really influence your SEO ranks? If it does, is it about picking the best-performing one or the most popular/common one?

 

[LinkHeros]

I think the speed of a site is a ranking factor, although I'm not sure how important of a ranking factor it is. Unless your site takes 5+ seconds to load, you should be fine.

For most people just starting out, shared hosting will be sufficient. I'm not sure if there is much of a difference between each of the hosting companies. Once your site reaches higher traffic levels, you will need a VPS or dedicated server.

 

[PenguinManiac]

PenguinManiac

And I guess not all shared hostings will be assessed equaly by search engines, right? Is it entirely dependent on loading times or other criteria such as location or the provider's popularity and reputation taken into account as well? Because that would explain the huge price gap between certain hosting companies (aside from the obvious technological gap, which probably plays a huge role).

 

[LinkHeros]

LinkHeros

I think the only thing that the search engines will be concerned about when it comes to hosting providers is the speed. Popularity and reputation will not directly impact your rankings, but if a provider has a bad reputation there is usually a reason, and the reason will be slow speed or downtime. These things will impact your rankings.

So I guess it pays to look around and read reviews of different hosting providers, you really want a fast and reliable one if you are building an online business.

 

[PenguinManiac]

PenguinManiac

Yeah, it makes sense, I must have switched cause and effect. Even so, unless there's an abysmal difference in performance between two servers, will it be as influential as to have a strong impact on your rank? Can a, say, 1-2 seconds difference in loading times really give you the upper edge over your competitors?
Thanks for the clarification, anyway!

 

[LinkHeros]

LinkHeros

Again, I'm not sure how much of a direct impact site speed has on rankings, but it will affect the user experience.

A lot of people see SEO and UX as two separate ideas, but if your site takes too long to load then users will just press the back button and go onto the next result. This kind of behaviour does directly influence rankings, if users are constantly leaving your site immediately this tells the search engines that your site is not quality and should not be ranked highly.

 

[PenguinManiac]

PenguinManiac

Smart remark there. Google must surely insightfully analize user behaviour, since that's the first data they can gather, and also the most reliable as well. I guess this explains why I'm seeing fewer and fewer pages with those initial loading screens you'd get a glance of every now and then.

 

[vishwa]

Yes, Hosting have a little influence on SEO. Since a fast loading pages are good for SEO hence its depends on the server quality. A Good web hosting provider can offer you 100% network up-time and quality services as well. While a poor server can give you several down-times and low quality supports, which will impact your site performance.

 

[alexanderzx360]

Since which hosting you employ on your website is something exclusive to the web owner, it doesn't directly affect the SEO. The only thing that your viewers can notice it's wrong is the load speed of your website, which doesn't affect the search engines, again, directly.

Of course, if the load speed is a factor that makes your audience leave your website and stop visiting it, it can affect the search results, so you need to be careful with the quality of your hosting service.

Cheers!

 

[nuzzo]

Speed does play a role, so fi your hosing causes some slow speed even after you optimize your site to load quickly, then it would be best to switch to a better hosting.