How Important Is Web Hosting For SEO?

January 18, 2025 12:54 pm by Alex

TLDR: Fast, Reliable, Secure Web Hosting: The Foundation of Your SEO Success

SEO & Web Hosting

How Important is Hosting for SEO?

The simple answer is that fast, reliable and secure web hosting is crucial from a usability perspective, making it equally important for SEO. Conversely, slow, insecure and unreliable hosting can negatively impact usability and, consequently, your SEO efforts.

In this article, we will delve into why robust web hosting can give you a competitive edge—at a far better cost and return than simply increasing your SEO budget in other areas.

Why Hosting is Good for SEO

Speed
Uptime and Downtime
Security
Location

We will explore each of these points in detail to help you make an informed decision about your SEO-optimised hosting.

Hosting Is Your Website’s Home On The Web

A significant amount of money is invested in website design and development, with even more spent on SEO, PPC and digital marketing to drive traffic to your site. However, hosting is often overlooked, which is a costly mistake. Cheap hosting can result in a slow and unreliable site with poor conversion rates. If you’re investing in driving traffic to your site, ensuring it is fast and available is crucial to maximising conversion rates.

Let’s examine the main web hosting factors that can affect your SEO:

1. Speed

The importance of speed for SEO and conversion rates cannot be overstated. Slow websites frustrate users and search engines alike. Ensuring your website loads in under 2 seconds is key to leveraging speed as an SEO ranking factor and keeping users happy. Slow websites can lead to lost sales, which is entirely avoidable.

Unfortunately, many websites fall short of the 2-second goal, often due to slow hosting. Fortunately, you can test your website and hosting speed with tools like:

1.1. Pingdom

Pingdom is an excellent tool for testing website speed. It details load times and breaks down what causes delays. Pay particular attention to the ‘wait time,’ which is largely driven by your hosting.

Pingdom also offers a service that consistently tests your website’s performance to ensure optimal page speeds. A website that is fast at 7 pm may not perform well during peak times. Pingdom helps identify if your site performs 24/7.

Pingdom Tool

If your loading times exceed 2 seconds, contact us for a quick review to determine if the issue is with your website or hosting and how to improve your SEO and conversion rates.

1.2. Google Page Speed

Google’s tool focuses more on technical optimisations for your website but also indicates if slow loading times are due to substandard hosting. It provides real-world examples of how fast your site loads for actual users—invaluable data!

Google Page Speed Insights

Hosting Speed is Crucial for SEO

In 2021, Google introduced new metrics in Google Search Console to help understand page experience and Core Web Vitals, which measure real-world website performance. While we haven’t seen huge ranking impacts yet, this diagnostic information is crucial.

Ultimately, slow sites won’t rank as highly as fast, mobile-optimised sites. Ensure your hosting is lightning-fast to maximise visibility and convert more visitors!

2. Uptime & Downtime

Google is an answers engine, crawling the web to categorise content and return the best answers. But what if your website is down or intermittently slow? Google won’t trust sending users to an unreliable site, hampering your SEO efforts over time.

Use tools from Pingdom or register with Google Search Console to check if your site is unavailable for Google.

3. Security

Website security is vital for SEO. Popular content management systems like WordPress can become insecure if not well-maintained, leading to hacks that hijack your traffic and rankings to deliver nefarious content.

Proactive security measures, such as website firewalls and antivirus, combined with regular maintenance, are essential. If your site gets hacked, it impacts search engine trust and negatively affects your SEO and rankings.

If you’ve been hacked and need advice on a proactive hosting solution, get in touch.

4. Location

Search engines consider location-based signals when ordering results. Where is the user? Where is the business? Where is the site hosted? Hosting location affects speed, as data travel distance impacts performance.

Cheap hosting is often not located in your target country. For a UK business, host in a UK data centre. For a US business, host in a US data centre. For global operations, use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) with hubs worldwide to serve content locally for fast performance.

Buying hosting based on price alone may result in non-local data centres, negatively impacting site performance and SEO rankings.

Nutshell – Hosting Affects SEO Rankings

Much of digital marketing and SEO is common sense. Google wants to send users to fast, reliable websites. Users won’t wait for slow sites. We need secure hosting to avoid hacks and geographically appropriate hosting for our target audience.

Great hosting won’t magically boost your website to the top of search engines, but it is a prerequisite for strong SEO results. This is the foundation on which solid SEO results are built.