Does web hosting affect SEO? This is a question that comes up fairly often. Web hosting is one of the most crucial parts of your online presence - but does it affect SEO rankings?
Cheap web hosts can put you on an old, poorly maintained server and this could cause your website not to work properly. Shared servers with many people will slow down the speed at which visitors are able experience your site while also possibly crashing their browser due in part from too much traffic hitting one shared resource; if these problems were prolonged even further by using a small data pipe then it would be impossible for anyone visiting your sites.
If your website doesn't load within 2.3 seconds, people will leave. They'll hit the back button and then they'll be gone. Your website never even loaded - that's why it's important to have a good web host.
Listen to the Episode
Atiba de Souza: You've done all you can. You've optimized. Your developer has told you that their code is clean, but yet, and still, when you do a speed test on your website. It still sucks. You're still coming in at a low B, maybe a C or even a D for speed and performance. And you're pulling your hair out. Look, I pulled most of my hair out trying to figure that out before, so I get it.
And today, I'm going to give you a secret of what could be causing your speed issues on your website. Hey, everybody! Welcome to Traffic Keys. I am your host, Atiba. And if you are a business owner who wants to drive more eyeballs to your website, but you're frustrated because you keep getting SEO reports that say that your site speed sucks, then I've got an answer for you that may help you because, yes, site speed is important. It's an important ranking factor for SEO. And guess what? It might be your web host's fault. Yes, your web host could be screwing up your website speed. So, let me just— I'm going to give you a case study and I'm going to tell you a quick story. A real story of what happened to us and one of our clients a few years ago.
So, we had a client who came to us and they said, Hey, I've had my developers look at all the technical stuff behind the website, we've done all the On page stuff. And, we just can't get our site's speed faster. We keep failing, and failing in this case it was getting a C because you really want to be in the A range for site speed.
We want to get up in the A range and they were using GT metrics to test their site speed. A few years ago, like, we don't know what's going on. We took a look at their site and everything looked great, everything looked wonderful. And we made one recommendation which they took. And that one recommendation, my friend, took them from a site speed of a C to a site speed of an A. And that was, they switched their web host.
You see, your web host and where your website is hosted is super, super important to your SEO. because you can do all the things right. But if your web host— if you're dealing with one of these really cheap web hosts, and they're putting you on an old server, if they're putting you on a shared server with a bunch of other people, if they're putting you on a server that has a small data pipe and can serve all the clients that are on that machine.
Guess what? That's going to affect you. And there's really nothing you can do about it at that web host. The only thing that you can do is leave and find a better web host. And yes, web hosting, I know, it's become a commodity. It's become a zero sum game. Everybody's trying to get to the cheapest price for web hosting.
And as a business owner, you probably took the best price that you can see because they throw a bunch of technical stuff at you that you probably didn't understand. Hey, listen, I've been in this industry for a long time, and sometimes I look at some of the things that web hosts tell you, and I don't even understand what they're talking about.
Okay. So you probably looked at it and you didn't know, and you went with the cheapest option. Well, Sadly, you get what you pay for. Now, I'm not saying you got to spend a crazy amount of money. Okay. But what I am saying is between the $15 and about $25 a month, you can get super, super solid hosting. And that's not a lot of money to make sure that your website, which is usually one of your primary marketing channels, is functioning well, and that the SEO for your website is rock solid. We switched web hosts for our client and a dramatically affect their site speed or factor their site speed. And then their SEO and their pages started rising in the ranking because Google cares a ton about user experience. And if your site takes too long to load that's poor user experience, you know, they say, I think it now it's like 2.3 seconds, if your site doesn't load in 2.3 seconds, people leave. They'll hit the back button, then they're gone and your site never even loaded. You didn't even have a chance. So, your web host is super important. And now you're going to ask me, "Okay, I hear all of that, but what web host should I use?" Well, I'll tell you this, for us our choice is Flywheel. It's get flywheel.com. We'll put a link to this down below for you, as well. That's who we use to host all of our critical websites. Sites that we know we want to rank at clients' sites that we know we want to write. We use get flywheel and we use them for a couple of reasons.
One very ridiculously fast. They're speed is super fast because they've perfected two things, caching and CDN, and that gets really technical. Basically, they figured out how to get your website to load fast. That's number one and number two, which is even more important. Their technical service is out of this world.
They have the best chat support of any web hosts I've ever used. And I've used a ton of them supporting clients. Absolutely the best you get on with them, their hosts. I'm sorry, their chat hosts know their stuff. They can answer your questions. They can get stuff, fixing, and that's the thing that I also like, they don't just answer your question.
They will log in and fix your stuff for you. Absolutely wonderful. Now there's one downside. One downside. They only do WordPress hosting. So, get flywheel, it's great if you have a WordPress website. If you're on some other platform, they don't handle that at all. But if you're on WordPress, which most of you are I bet.
Right. And if you're not, you're probably on Shopify and well, Shopify has its own hosting. Okay. And there's nothing you can do there, but if you're on WordPress using WooCommerce, which most of you, I bet are, get Flywheel is your answer. There is a link down below, and it is an affiliate link, but I'm telling you, this is what we use.
This is where I host my websites. Okay. So it is an affiliate link. It won't cost you anything to click on that link, but I do make a small commission. If you decide to sign up with them. So, as always, if you've got any questions, drop your questions down below. I want to know what they are. I want to answer your questions about web hosting and how it can affect your SEO.
And also if you're on the podcast, Hey, send me an email hello@traffickeys.com would be more than happy to answer any of your questions as well. Alright, everybody. Have a great day. Bye bye.
