Consistently ranking high in search results is crucial for your online business, and savvy website owners know that high-speed web hosting is an essential element of any SEO strategy.
Google uses page speed as a metric in ranking your website. A webpage’s load-time affects user engagement, so a sluggish performance leads to a high bounce rate. Pages that load fast are easier for search engines to discover and index.
This article will explore the SEO benefits that come with high-performance web hosting, starting with a look at the impact page speed has on SEO. We’ll discuss how opting for a provider that specializes in SEO web hosting is a way for small business owners to ensure fast page speed and take control of their SEO strategy.
The Impact of Page Speed on SEO
A page’s speed is the amount of time required for it to load in a user’s browser, and it’s a crucial factor in SEO.
Are you wondering what your most active web page’s speed is? You can find out using 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.
If your speed score isn’t great and you want to improve it, you need to understand how page speed affects your SEO.
Google Measures Page Speed & Uses It to Rank Your Site
The most significant impact that page speed has on SEO is tied to the fact that Google uses page speed as a ranking factor. Google measures how long it takes your page to load, assigns your site a speed score, and then uses that score as part of the criteria to determine your position in search results.
Google is transparent about many details of its ranking algorithm, publishing SEO guidelines to help site owners maximize traffic. Google’s ability to find and index your content includes several factors related to page speed, including how your site is structured, if your images are optimized, and how mobile-friendly your site is.
The connection between page speed and search rankings makes it evident that high-speed web hosting should be part of your SEO plan, but let’s dig deeper.
Fast-Loading Pages Engage Users, Lowering Your Bounce Rate
Google’s ranking algorithm includes many factors, but when viewed as a whole, its approach centers around one priority: the user experience.
Pages with a short load time are more likely to engage users, which results in a lower bounce rate and a higher average dwell time. Both of these factors are ranking signals, so if many people leave your site because of slow-loading pages, it’ll negatively impact your SEO.
Where does Google expect high page speed? On mobile devices.
Google has been ranking sites based on mobile-friendliness for a while, but it’s about to get serious. In March 2021, the company will finalize a long-term effort to implement mobile-first indexing. This means their algorithm will ignore the desktop version of a page’s content when evaluating relevance. You should ensure your content is the same in the desktop and mobile versions by the time this change kicks in.
To fully address user experience as part of your SEO strategy, seek SEO-focused web hosting to help you ensure high page speed, with a laser focus on how your site performs on mobile devices.
High Page Speed Makes Your Site More Crawlable
When your web pages load quickly, search engines’ web crawlers can easily find it and discover and index your content. Google can’t return search results for content it’s never seen, so making sure that your site is crawlable should be at the top of your SEO to-do list.
If a search engine finds slow-loading pages or errors while trying to index your content, it moves on. This happens even if some of your content hasn’t been indexed yet. If it happens repeatedly, your site could be flagged as unreliable, pushing it out of top search results.
An SEO-focused web hosting provider will make your site easier for search engines to crawl. They’ll offer hands-on help in addressing common technical issues related to web page speed, like optimizing images, ensuring a simple URL structure, and making your links crawlable.
Overseas Page Speed Matters
How your website performs for users in other countries has a big effect on your SEO.
Search engine results are localized — using the same set of keywords, the listings in one country will be different from those in another. Your ranking in other countries will be based on how fast your web pages load there. If your site loads slowly, your bounce rate will increase, and if web crawlers experience the same slowness, your search rankings will suffer.
SEO-focused hosting providers control this by using a content delivery network (CDN). It’s a network of servers in different locations worldwide that send content to users near those servers. The main copy of your content is stored on a primary host server, and remote servers keep a cached copy.
CDNs enable fast content delivery regardless of a user’s location, an SEO web hosting factor you shouldn’t overlook.
How SEO Web Hosting Ensures Fast Page Speed
Small business owners can benefit from working with a hosting provider that maintains high-performance servers and uses a CDN to ensure a great user experience, regardless of a user’s location. With the consistently high page speed that these providers can deliver, one of the most important parts of your SEO will be taken care of.
An SEO hosting provider will help you address all SEO aspects of your website. In addition to fast page speed and a 99.9% uptime guarantee, the best providers offer SEO tools, help customers with site optimization, and include SEO-boosting security features.
SEO-focused providers offer managed WordPress hosting plans that address everything we mentioned above and more. WordPress web servers are lightning-fast and optimized with enhanced content caching. Search engines look for a fast server response time, and you can get that if your CMS helps you with image compression, optimized HTML, and lightweight themes.
Taking managed WordPress hosting to another level, HostPapa offers Optimized WordPress Hosting. Plans include the latest WordPress version and access to more than 100 free professional themes. Your site will live on a web server optimized for WordPress, ensuring enhanced speed, reliability, stability, and security. Thanks to integration with Cloudflare Content Delivery Network, performance is guaranteed, no matter where your users are located. There are built‑in WordPress security features, plus a free SSL certificate.
HostPapa’s Optimized WordPress Hosting is a service that takes every part of the SEO picture into account to let customers enjoy the benefits of consistently high web traffic.
The fact that Google uses page speed as a ranking signal is a compelling reason to make high-speed web hosting a priority when implementing your SEO strategy. In this article, we’ve explored this and other factors, like the impact of page load-time on user engagement, site crawlability, and long-distance performance.
We hope we’ve put you on the right track to leverage SEO-focused web hosting and grow your small business!
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