In the fast-paced setting of digital marketing, timing is everything. Website speed has gone from a bonus to an important ranking factor that directly impacts your SEO success. It’s not uncommon for businesses to expend substantial effort and total media in producing content, doing keyword research, and building links, yet fail to focus on one of the most basic factors impacting their SEO: hosting. 

This element determines how quickly a website loads, the reliability of its performance, and ultimately the site’s placement in the SERP. Having a solid grasp of the relationship between hosting and overall ranking can give you a competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

The Direct Link Between Website Speed and SEO

Google has openly talked about the ranking importance attributed to the speed of a page to their algorithms. In 2010, the speed of a site became an official ranking signal for searches on desktop, and in 2018, Google released the Speed Update, stating that speed would be a ranking factor for searches on mobile devices as well. This was not just a coincidence: Google’s primary goal is to give users the best experience possible, and slow websites cannot do that.

The introduction of Core Web Vitals by Google in 2021 solidified the importance of performance for a website. These metrics measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. Websites that are poor performers on Core Web Vitals will be penalised in their rankings, while the sites that excel will enjoy a competitive advantage. Your hosting infrastructure impacts all three Core Web Vitals metrics, making it a critical building block for your SEO strategy.

Search engines have to use a crawl budget to determine how many pages they will index from your website. As slow-load websites use more crawl budget per page, search engines may index fewer pages on your site. With fast hosting, search engine bots will be able to crawl more pages, thereby increasing the number of pages indexed and enhancing the visibility of your entire site in search engines.

How Hosting Quality Affects Website Performance

The calibre of your web hosting service dictates your website’s speed, and each of the following factors will help explain what I mean. The server’s response time – or Time to First Byte (TTFB) – indicates how quickly your server responds to requests from the browser. Cheap hosting plans that put you on an overcrowded shared hosting server often have an extremely slow TTFB that affects your page speed scores and SEO negatively. 

The location of the server is crucial for the speed of your website. When the hosting server is a distance away from your visitor, the data has to travel a greater distance, causing latency. Good hosting providers will offer Content Delivery Networks and multiple server locations so the content reaches the visitor much faster.

The quality of hardware makes a considerable difference in performance. Lower-end hosting providers will often use very outdated hardware and use traditional hard drives instead of solid-state disks. Hosting with solid state disks and using the latest processing technology and tuned server configurations allows for way quicker loading times that help with your SEO.

Resource allocation is how much computing power you’re allocated on the server for your website. When you’re on a shared hosting plan, you are often allocated server resources with dozens or hundreds of websites, and if all of the sites being served to visitors are experiencing spikes in traffic, it can affect your performance. VPS hosting and dedicated servers can guarantee you allocated resources for your site, and thus performance that search engines reward with ranking improvements.

The Cascading Effects of Poor Hosting on SEO

Site speed has an impact on user behaviour, which Google monitors and utilises as a ranking signal. If your hosting creates a slow time to load, visitors will be more likely to leave your site sooner rather than later, increasing your bounce rate. A high bounce rate means search engines view your site as not delivering what the users were seeking in relation to other sites, thereby impacting your ranking.

There’s a direct correlation between page load time and user engagement metrics. For example, pages with a load time of up to two seconds have an average bounce rate of 9%, while pages with a load time of five seconds see the rates increase to 38%. As you engage users on your site, it all impacts your search ranking, contributing to user signals. Poor hosting results in poor signals for users, in turn, lower performance and ranking in SEO.

Mobile optimisation is an essential aspect of an SEO strategy, and Google has emphasised it more by using mobile-first indexing to rank most websites. Mobile users are frequently using slower internet connections than desktop users, which makes the performance of your hosting for speed much more significant. If your host is not offering you speed performance on mobile, your mobile SEO performance is hampered.

Secure protocol with a hosting solution is yet another factor about hosting that also has an impact on performance for SEO. With Google Chrome marking websites as “Not Secure” with addresses that start with “HTTP and that do not have “SSL Certificates”, it greatly deters visitors from proceeding to your site (especially for e-commerce) and results in low conversion rates. Search engines also prefer to list “Secure” implementation sites and pages higher in the rankings. Quality Hosting Providers account for this when providing your site’s hosting performance. 

Uptime, Reliability, and Search Engine Trust

Website uptime has a direct effect on your SEO rankings. When search crawler bots attempt to access your website and find it down, they document the error. If your website is frequently down, it may be noted as unstable, and search engines may penalise you by lowering your rank or decreasing their frequency in accessing your site. While you may not pay all that much for a web host, some budget hosts guarantee uptime that is easily lower than the competition, and thus put your SEO at risk.

When compared to all the quality web hosts available, 99.9% uptime is the industry standard for quality web hosting. This gives a website approximately 8.7 hours of downtime in one year. However, in general, a quality hosting provider will guarantee at least 99.99% uptime. This seems like a very minor difference. But both uptime and reliability a small measurement that leads to bigger results when it comes to the long-term performance of your site’s SEO and trust from the search engines.

Server error messages like 500 Internal Server Errors or 503 Service Unavailable will ultimately sabotage your SEO. If search engines continually experience error messages from your website, they may temporarily exclude your pages from search results altogether, or at the very least, crawl your pages less frequently. Quality hosting infrastructure will minimise server errors and thus maintain your website’s visibility with the search engines. 

Making the Right Hosting Choice for SEO Success

Choosing the right hosting plan involves weighing performance, reliability, and cost. Look for hosting plans that offer SSD storage, CDN integration, automatic backups, caching built-in, and an uptime guarantee of 99.9% or better. Each of these items will directly contribute to faster load times and increased rankings. Finding a hosting provider that provides fast technical support is also important, since getting issues resolved quickly prevents longer site downtimes and SEO ranking losses.

Conclusion

Your hosting selection is more than just a technical decision; it is also a strategic decision that impacts every element of your online visibility when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation. The speed of your site, the uptime of your site, the security of your site, and the overall performance of your site all come from your hosting solution and affect the rankings of your site. Investing in a great hosting plan is investing in your SEO.

GlobeHostify offers high-performance hosting plans with reliability and search engine success in mind. With SSD storage, global Content Delivery Network integration, a guaranteed 99.9% uptime, and expert support, we ensure your website is built sturdily to rank higher and perform better. Check out our hosting plans today and take advantage of the edge it can provide to your SEO.