In its last algorithm update last August, Google changed a number of its ranking criteria that are directly related to the quality of your web hosting.
In this article we’ll take a look at the four aspects of your web hosting that can influence your website’s ability to rank and explain why they are important:
Server availability
Google is not at all inclined to send users to offline websites. If it continues to provide links to sites that don’t exist, people will turn to another search engine. Google therefore monitors how long websites are online and uses it as part of its ranking algorithm.
There are many reasons why your site may go offline. Some of these are related to changes you make to your site, such as putting it in maintenance mode or crashing by installing incompatible software or because of coding errors.
Other reasons could be due to your web hosting, for example when your server needs a patch and an update of its operating system.
With some hosting solutions, however, the length of time your website is offline may be unacceptable to Google. For example, if the hardware is outdated, unreliable, and fails, or if too few resources are available for shared hosting accounts, the server simply cannot keep up with the amount of traffic. In these cases, it can affect the ranking capacity of the site.
To protect you, Genious provides guaranteed uptime backed by a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The minimum you should be looking for is 99.95% uptime. If you need 100% uptime, you should choose a vps cloud hosting solution.
Site loading speed
Site speed is important to search engines because it improves the customer experience. Slow loading websites have much higher bounce rates because users just aren’t willing to wait for them to load.
For this reason, the slower a site, the less likely it is that Google will feature it in its results. In addition, the site should work quickly on mobile devices.
Google takes a number of timescales into consideration when evaluating performance, such as how long it takes to start loading content on a browser, how quickly the page becomes interactive, and how long it takes your server. to respond to an action taken by the user, for example, by clicking on a link.
If your server is operating too slowly on any of these criteria, it will affect your pages’ ability to rank well.
Server location
Your site’s data has to go from point A to B and the further it has to go, the longer it takes. This increases latency, which makes your server respond more slowly to requests from a user’s browser and, therefore, reduces site speed.
While it is possible to speed up overall load times using a content delivery network (CDN), it only works for static website data i.e. website content that remains the same.
For websites that provide a lot of dynamic data i.e. pages that change for individual users or show things like product search results, the closer the server is to the browser, the better. performances.
SSL certificates
The padlock icon displayed on browsers is a clear indication of how seriously Google takes security. The last thing he wants is to send his users to sites where their financial data is at risk of being intercepted due to an insecure connection between the browser and the website.
Today, the security of that connection is essential to perform well in search engine results. The only way to get a green padlock icon is to install a Genious SSL certificate which will encrypt data flowing between the browser and the server.
Conclusion
In its drive to provide better services to its users, Google is pushing websites to improve their game. From a web hosting perspective, that means having a site that loads fast on all devices, that has minimum latency, is who online reliably 99.5% of the time or more.
Websites with these elements in place will be better positioned by Google’s algorithm.
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