The most delicious SEO cake, so to speak, comprises many different ingredients: interesting and informative content, an intuitive website layout, a strong link profile and relevant keywords, to list good examples. However, if there’s just one element where its obscurity belies its importance, it’s web hosting.
Web hosting is like the flour of your SEO cake: you don’t immediately see it in the finished thing, but neglecting it can threaten to leave everything else unravelling. Here’s how to find suitable web hosting.
Satisfy your site’s need for speed
Why is this speed a “need”? Basically because, without it, whoever tries to access your site could, out of impatience, simply click away and seek out a competing site that moves like greased lightning.
As a general rule, your website ought not to take any longer than a couple of seconds to load. A loading time longer than that is likely to test the patience of visitors who, online, probably have plenty of other options at their disposal. The bottom line is, your hosting provider’s servers must be zippy.
Have time on your hands – high uptime, that is
When visiting a website, there’s one thing more frustrating than a lethargic loading time: a complete inability to load at all. Sadly, that can too easily occur if the server on which the website is hosted goes down, and it will at some point; no hosting provider can guarantee 100% uptime.
Still, you should look for hosting that can get as close to it as possible. Furthermore, when your site does suffer an outage, it needs to bounce back quickly – and this ties in with our next point…
Make sure you get responsive support
Every minute your site is out of action is, potentially, a minute of lost sales. If your hosting does falter, though, it would be ideal if the provider can promptly spring into action to restore your site’s presence.
At Webahead, we offer a range of hosting plans and back them up with an expert support team. Whether you run into an issue with our hosting or want to make an initial enquiry about it, just dial 01325 582112.
Choose the right hosting plan – and change it if necessary
Servers can vary in their capacity, but the right hosting plan will be able to accommodate the volume of traffic your site regularly receives. As your site becomes more popular, it might need to switch to a higher capacity to avoid crashing. Thankfully, we make transitioning between our hosting plans easy.
Look for a hosting provider that understands SEO
One risk of opting for a company that specialises strictly in web hosting is that, sometimes, they could make moves that damage your SEO without even realising it. Some providers might even shut down websites that attract a high amount of traffic, or ask you to remove certain SEO-friendly plugins.
This dichotomy is a big reason why our team at Webahead offer SEO-friendly web hosting to go with our portfolio of more familiar SEO services.
