Hosting options that affect your SEO
Disks and server architecture
Powerful hardware , namely NVMe drives, combined with servers from well-known brands, in particular Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC, provide, according to the results of testing with workloads, 12 and 7 times better file reading and writing speeds . Accordingly, websites on such hardware will load faster.
Since Google measures page load times, slow sites can be ranked lower. In addition, site load time directly affects bounce rate and conversion rate. In particular, according to recent calculations, pages that load in 1 second have a 39% conversion rate, while those that load in 6 seconds have half the rate – 18%.
Goal Conversion Rate Table
Source: Conversion Rate vs. Page Load Time Study | Portent, 2022
Web server
The web server and software on your hosting also play a significant role in loading speed. Currently, the best choice among the offers on the market would be a LiteSpeed web server or a combination of Apache + Nginx.
LiteSpeed is designed for sites with high traffic and a lot of media content, while Nginx is more suitable for those who want the freedom of custom server settings.
With LiteSpeed, you can additionally connect the LiteSpeed Cache plugin, which will cache content at the server level, not the browser, which will allow you to speed up the site even more.
WordPress Performance on a Server with Plugins
Uptime
Uptime, or the percentage of uninterrupted operation, directly depends on the number of sites hosted on the server, the reliability of the equipment, the monitoring system, unforeseen situations, and the human factor, because the servers in the data center are still supported by people.
The ideal indicator is 99.9% . If you see a measure like “100% uptime” on the hoster’s website, be sure, these are ordinary marketing manipulations. Unfortunately, such an indicator will never be “in a vacuum”, because no one has canceled system failures, power outages, DDoS attacks and planned technical work to improve the performance of the architecture. Another thing is that in such situations the hoster’s team should react promptly and the downtime should not be too long.
If your pages are unavailable for at least 10 minutes a day, you can safely sit back and wait for them to disappear from the index, and accordingly, to drop in search results.
Data center location
The further the physical server is located from your target paraguay phone number library audience, the longer the data transfer path will be, the longer the server response time, and as a result, the site will take longer for users to load. You can notice this when you open foreign sites from Ukraine.
This gave rise to the generally accepted rule of thumb – choose a data center location according to the target region . This way, SEO strategies for your chosen region will work well and you won’t blow your budget.
If you plan to promote your website outside of Ukraine, you don’t have to choose a foreign hoster. Ukrainian companies also offer a choice of server locations (Ukraine, Poland, the Netherlands, the USA). In addition, free technical support will be included in the price, unlike most foreign hosters.
Choosing server locations
Availability of an SSL certificate
If a hosting company helps with connecting SSL to your site, that's a definite plus. It means they care about the security of the hosted sites and their reputation in search engines.
SSL certificates allow sites to operate over the secure HTTPS encryption protocol. And Google often, if not directly, at least hints that if there are 2 sites with the same SEO indicators, but one has SSL enabled and the other does not, the algorithm will give preference to the secure site operating over HTTPS.
In addition, if the site does not have SSL, a message will pop up saying that the connection is not secure. According to statistics, 83% of visitors leave such resources and go to competitors' sites. Poor UX = reduced average time spent on the site and lack of conversions.
