Ranking high in search results on a consistent basis is critical for your online business, and savvy website owners understand that high speed web hosting is an important part of any SEO strategy.
Google uses page speed as a ranking metric. The time it takes for a webpage to load has an impact on user engagement, so slow performance leads to a high bounce rate. Search engines find and index pages that load quickly.
This article will look at the SEO benefits of high speed web hosting, beginning with a look at how page speed affects SEO. We’ll go over how small business owners can ensure fast page speed and take control of their SEO strategy by using a provider that specializes in SEO web hosting.
High Speed Web Hosting Influence on SEO
The time it takes for a page to load in a user’s browser is called page speed, and it’s an important factor in SEO.
Are you curious about the speed of your most popular website? Google’s PageSpeed Insights, a free tool that provides a detailed speed report based on the same metrics Google uses to evaluate your site’s performance, can tell you.
If you want to improve your page speed, you must first understand how page speed affects your SEO.
Google Uses Page Speed to Rank Your Site
Page speed has the greatest impact on SEO because Google uses it as a ranking factor. Google calculates how long it takes for your page to load, assigns a speed score to your site, and uses that score as one of the factors in determining your position in search results.
Many details of Google’s ranking algorithm are open to the public, with SEO guidelines published to assist site owners in increasing traffic. Several factors related to page speed influence Google’s ability to find and index your content, including how your site is structured, whether your images are optimized, and how mobile-friendly your site is.
The link between page speed and search rankings suggests that high-speed web hosting should be a part of your SEO strategy, but let’s dig a little deeper.
Fast-Loading Pages Keep Users on Your Site Longer, Lowering Your Bounce Rate
Although Google’s ranking algorithm takes into account a variety of factors, its overall approach is focused on one thing: the user experience.
Users are more likely to engage with pages that load quickly, resulting in a lower bounce rate and longer average dwell time. Both of these factors are ranking signals, so if a large number of people abandon your site due to slow-loading pages, your SEO will suffer.
When it comes to page speed, where does Google expect it? On a smartphone.
For a while now, Google has been ranking websites based on their mobile friendliness, but things are about to change. The company plans to complete a long-term project to implement mobile-first indexing in March 2021. This means that when assessing relevance, their algorithm will disregard the content of a page’s desktop version. By the time this change takes effect, you should have ensured that your content is identical on desktop and mobile.
Seek SEO-focused web hosting to help you ensure high page speed, with a laser focus on how your site performs on mobile devices, to fully address user experience as part of your SEO strategy.
Crawlability is Improved by a Fast Page Speed
Web crawlers can easily find and index your content if your web pages load quickly. Because Google can’t return search results for content it hasn’t seen, making sure your website is crawlable should be at the top of your SEO priority list.
When a search engine tries to index your content and encounters slow-loading pages or errors, it abandons the process. Even if some of your content has yet to be indexed, this will occur. If this happens frequently, your site may be flagged as untrustworthy, causing it to drop out of the first page of search results.
A web hosting company that focuses on SEO will make it easier for search engines to crawl your site. They’ll give you hands-on help with common web page speed issues like image optimization, ensuring a simple URL structure, and making your links crawlable.
Page Speed in Other Countries is Important
The performance of your website for users in other countries has a significant impact on your SEO.
Because search engine results are localized, even if they use the same set of keywords, the results in one country may differ from those in another. In other countries, your ranking will be determined by how quickly your web pages load. Your bounce rate will increase if your site loads slowly, and if web crawlers experience the same slowness, your search rankings will suffer.
SEO-focused hosting providers manage this through the use of a content delivery network (CDN). It is a global network of servers that send content to users in close proximity to those servers. The primary copy of your content is kept on a primary host server, with a cached copy kept on remote servers.
CDNs enable fast content delivery regardless of a user’s location, which is an important SEO web hosting factor to consider.
How SEO Web Hosting Ensures Quick Page Loading
Working with a high speed web hosting provider that maintains high-performance servers and uses a CDN to ensure a great user experience regardless of a user’s location can benefit small business owners. One of the most important aspects of your SEO will be taken care of thanks to the consistently high page speed that these providers can provide.
An SEO hosting provider will assist you in dealing with all SEO aspects of your website. Aside from fast page speed and a 99.9% uptime guarantee, the best providers provide SEO tools, assist customers with site optimization, and include SEO-enhancing security features.
Managed WordPress hosting plans from SEO-focused providers include everything we’ve discussed so far, plus more. WordPress web servers are extremely fast and feature enhanced content caching. Search engines value quick server response times, which you can achieve with image compression, optimized HTML, and lightweight themes provided by your CMS.
The fact that Google uses page speed as a ranking signal is compelling evidence that you should prioritize high-speed web hosting as part of your SEO strategy. This and other factors, such as the impact of page load time on user engagement, site crawlability, and long-distance performance, have been discussed in this article.
We hope we’ve helped you get started using SEO-focused web hosting to grow your small business!
