Does Website Hosting Impact Your SEO Performance?

Having a website has become a vital aspect of every business in this digital era. Irrespective of the industry or the size of the business, everyone wants their website to rank on the first page of search engine ranking pages. It is comprehensible that websites listed on the second page of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo will likely receive far less traffic. So, to be listed higher on the search results, businesses spend a significant amount of time and money improving their website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rankings.

There are a lot of factors that impact the SEO rankings of a website, and addressing each of them will indeed take time. And for your SEO efforts to produce noticeable results, it’ll take you even longer. However, one of the influential factors that may immediately help your SEO ranking is a fast and smooth operating website. Users today want a website to be fast and trustworthy, so search engines will not show websites that aren’t.

The factor that can positively impact the speed, trustworthiness, security, and other critical elements of your website is your web hosting service provider. Let us look at how a web hosting provider can impact your website’s SEO ranking.

Below are the key factors that affect the SEO of a website:

1. Speed Of Your Website

No one likes waiting for a web page to load. Waiting is so detested across the internet that significant search engines such as Google factors a website’s loading speed into its SEO score. Thus, websites that load immediately are given a boost in the search results. Also, if your website takes longer than 2 seconds, your prospects are likely to bounce off your site, hindering your SEO score. However, you can improve your website’s speed by reducing the number of media files or compressing the images on your website, but nothing can impact its speed as your web hosting. 

So, choosing a website hosting service provider that can provide visitors with a speedy experience is crucial for your web page ranking. Also, it can be challenging to reach that 2-seconds goal with the standard Shared Web Hosting. It is better to consider Virtual Private Servers or Cloud Hosting as they can significantly improve your website’s loading speed. A faster loading site pleases the users and will also have a significant impact on your SEO ranking.

Apart from your website’s speed and reliability, security is also a crucial factor that impacts your website’s SEO ranking. Google and other search engines commonly give preference to more secure websites. It gives an edge to sites with SSL certificates, which is an example that shows the extent to which your website security is crucial for your SEO. 

The security features offered by your hosting provider are critical for the overall security of your website. Thus, it would benefit if you opted for the best web hosting for SEO, the service providers with a good track record, and the latest security features.

The only thing that can be worse than a slow website is that it won’t load. Website downtime is usually caused due to hardware failure, an overcrowded server, a security breach, or something else. Unfortunately, even if your website is offline for just a few minutes at a time, it can lower your website’s SEO performance. Moreover, Google and other search engines can flag your website as untrustworthy. If this downtime lasts for days instead of minutes, Google may de-list your website from the search results altogether. Thus, regular downtimes flag your site as unreliable and lead to your site’s ranking being downgraded. So, it is better to choose a dependable web hosting provider that can ensure uptime.

Suppose you and your visitors get a warning message that says Internal Server Error or Database Connection Failed while visiting your website; it could be because your server has been overloaded with traffic. However, this won’t hurt your SEO score as much as your site being fully offline, but it can push your website’s bounce rate way up.

As a short-term solution, you can create a cached copy of your website or popular pages so your visitors don’t need to connect to the database stored with your web host.

For a long-term solution, you should consider upgrading your web hosting plan. Database errors often result from the fact that you don’t have enough capacity to handle your website traffic. Ask your hosting provider about scaling up to a VPS or Cloud Web Hosting plan if you’re not already using these hosting types.

5. Support

Irrespective of whether you have an in-house technical support team or not, a 24×7 tech support availability offered by your web hosting service provider is an unquestionable necessity. If your domain gets hacked or your website is down due to some issues in your account, you will need readily available support from your hosting service provider. 



A fully dedicated and capable team will provide you with the best assistance and will ensure that your website is up and running in no time. A well-functioning site with no glitches will indeed positively impact its SEO performance.

It’s a wrap

It has become critical to rank higher on search engines in this competitive business environment, especially for keywords with heavy competition. There are a lot of techniques that can boost your website’s SEO performance, but most of these methods take time before having any real impact. Yet, every business needs to do whatever it can to positively affect its overall SEO performance to ensure better rankings and web authority. Having a reliable and trustworthy web hosting service provider can undoubtedly be the first step in the right direction for improving your website’s SEO score. If you’re looking to go beyond the impact of web hosting and need SEO assistance, reach out to us at Oamii. Our expert team of SEO professionals will help you improve organic traffic to your website. Contact us today to get a free SEO audit.