Does Shared Hosting Negatively Affect Your SEO?

It’s difficult to know where to begin when starting your business’s journey with SEO. SEO has lots of different factors and elements that go into your website’s rankings. The goal for most business’s content is to be ranking on the first page since more than 90% of searchers never go to page 2 of a search engine. We know lots of different ways and methods on how to improve your business’ SEO strategies, but are there negative factors we should be aware of?

There is a debate as to whether or not shared hosting is a factor that negatively affects your website’s SEO. The short answer is no. The choice of choosing shared web hosting or a web hosting plan does not affect the SEO of your website. While choosing shared hosting does not negatively impact the SEO of your website, it could sometimes influence your SEO if the user experiences are poor. 

Positive user experience is one of the most crucial things you want for your website. When there’s one factor that throws off your website, it could sometimes cause more damage than you think. The type of shared hosting you use won’t affect your SEO. As long as you’re utilizing, researching, and accomplishing what you need to do to have excellent SEO for your website over time.

The reason these two factors might have created a myth within the SEO world is because individuals tend to correlate action with causation. For example, let’s say shared hosting appeared to affect a small ranking factor. Individuals then could correlate all of shared hosting to negatively affect all of SEO. In reality, as long as your company is aware of what shared hosting does for your website, your business can still find success when trying to rank higher.

 

What is shared hosting?

A web host can be classified as the location where your website lives and where users can access your website. These locations are on servers that have large operating systems, memory, and storage components for your website or other websites to be located. If you have your website already hosted on sites such as GoDaddy or Bluehost, you are most likely sharing your hosting with other websites.

When it comes to shared hosting, multiple websites can be stored and own a part of this server space. For example, let’s think of an apartment building. An apartment building has lots of space and rooms for people to rent space and live in. A website can relate to an individual that rents a space to live and operate in. A server can relate to the apartment building that houses all of the websites. A website can rent space within a host to operate and store information. This results in users searching and finding their website online.

Most web hosting companies can provide promises of giving your business’ website the best space for your website to service on. Every hosting plan and type of hosting can differ. It’s important to find the right hosting plan that is the right fit for your business’ website. While SEO is a very important aspect to think of when choosing a shared host, this doesn’t mean you should choose a host based solely on SEO factors. It’s important to be mindful of these factors, especially since your search engine traffic will play a crucial role in the success of your website.

When using a shared host, there tends to be more of an effect on your business’ strategies rather than your actual SEO. Your shared host could possibly influence some ranking factors when web crawlers go out and view your website, but this is something you can fix and be aware of. 

Here are a few factors to consider when thinking about your website’s SEO when using a shared host:

 

Site Speed

One of the most important ranking factors for your website’s SEO is to have fast website speed. When your website doesn’t load quickly, this increases it’s chances of having a higher bounce rate and possibly ranking lower. When your website speed is slow, sluggish, and stagnant it gives users a reason to have a negative experience on your website. Having trustworthy and reliable site speed is crucial to your SEO ranking.

If you’re using shared hosting, this could possibly be one reason why your website isn’t loading as quickly. If your website uses a host that slows your website page down, this could result in a drop in your rankings. When web crawlers and users visit your website, they want to feel like they can trust your website with fast reaction times. It’s important to regularly check on the shared host you’re using to see if your website gets the site speed it needs to succeed.

 

Site Downtime

Site downtime is a normal process of hosting a site online. While this factor doesn’t happen often, it isn’t uncommon for a website to have downtime. Your best hope for your business is when this downtime occurs not during a profitable or common time that your users rely on your website. When your site is down, this creates a negative impact on your customers. Sometimes, it can lead to them not coming back.

While this factor can be scary, it’s important to look for a host that offers and delivers an uptime close to 100% and is backed by a guarantee or historical data. The lower the uptime the more downtime your website will expect to have. You want your users to enjoy the availability of your website to access at any time. Even if your site is experiencing more downtime than you prefer, this won’t have a huge impact on your SEO. However it can affect your user’s experiences with having a negative response to your site.

Google values it’s users and what they want to see and search for. They seek out websites that have easy accessibility, quick access, and ones they can trust. The more downtime your website has, it gives Google less of a reason to trust or recommend your site to others. If your website goes offline due to your shared host, be sure to clear it up quickly so search engines like Google aren’t likely to mark your business’s site as unreliable.

 

Traffic Surges

If you plan on receiving a large amount of traffic to your website, you want to make sure your shared host prepares for that. Whether your content goes viral or you receive a large amount of traffic another way, you want your site to be prepared on a high performing host. Plus, if this extended volume becomes normal, you need to have a host that can upgrade your server resources. If your website isn’t accessible or has slow site speed it gives search engines a reason not to trust or recommend your website. Which then could result in lower rankings for your site.

 

Having an SSL Certificate

Just like we mentioned previously, trust is everything to search engines and users. It’s important for your business to build trust and to have that trust portrayed through your website. One way you can do this, to help build credibility among your shared host and search engine, is having an SSL certificate. An SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate encrypts the exchange of information. This takes place between a user’s search engine and your server. Having this certificate helps build credibility and trust to your search engine and host that user data won’t be hacked or stolen.

 

Having Backup

Like the year 2020, we can’t foresee or expect what will or may happen next. Sometimes disaster can strike for businesses. This means their website could get hacked or even natural disasters could destroy or lose all of their records, storage, and data. Having backup is important when the unforeseeable future has a different route for your business. Whether that’s through your shared host or SEO website provider, having a backup in place helps your business not be impacted when your data may be lost or destroyed.

 

Having to choose a hosting company for your business can make it hard to decide which one is right for your needs. Take what you learned from this article and focus on what your business needs to receive the right balance of SEO rankings while using a shared host for your business.

Trust, security, and accessibility are important factors that go into your website’s SEO rankings. Performing good SEO is important for your business. Be sure you’re aware of the possible effects shared hosting might have on your business. 

Need help with your businesses SEO? Learn more about how Boostability can help you!