SEO and hosting

The relationship between SEO and hosting is important, for several reasons

Were you one of the millions of people waiting for the Oasis reunion announcement this morning? If you were, the announcement unwittingly revealed an important factor in the relationship between SEO and hosting.

Why are Oasis connected with SEO today?

I’ll be open from the outset, I am not a fan of Oasis and I visited out of interest. That is largely irrelevant though, I just had a feeling I’d see what I did when I attempted to access their website at 8am GMT today. This was what I was shown:

The website was inaccessible due to the number of visitors already on it. Before you say “Well what did you expect?” – I accept the fact that this was always going to be a somewhat unparalleled event.

Could they have avoided the hosting outage?

However, it was planned and scheduled. I would have thought that the management of a band with the resources of Oasis might have made sure that their web hosting providers could cope with the demand. Perhaps I am being somewhat harsh on them, given the volume of visitors?

I went back on the site later, thinking that I’d allow for demand to decrease and I’d probably have no problem. Alas, that wasn’t the case:

I have tried again, at 10:08 GMT + 1 (the screenshots show GMT, but I’m actually on GMT + 1 time due to the British Summer Time), and now it is showing an Error 20 (in a nutshell, the server is down or unable to respond to queries to access it).

Some Might Say it is understandable

I’ll repeat again that I know the gravity of the announcement, but I see no reason why they couldn’t prepare for an event like this and take hosting actions to ensure it could serve the requests the access it.

The site became accessible to me at 10:18:04 (GMT + 1), some 2 hours and 18 minutes after the announcement went live:

Should you pay more attention to hosting and SEO?

Oasis are far from the only people to suffer from a website crash due to unprepared or inadequate hosting.

Furthermore, it doesn’t need to be a website crash to impact your SEO. The relationship between SEO and hosting is important.

I doubt Oasis care too much about SEO, but other brands should.

In my experience, few businesses pay much attention to their web hosting provider, the performance the server will provide and any limitations it might have.

The reality is that, particularly in small businesses, there are often limitations in their choice. These can be because of the platform they’ve chosen (such as Shopify, when they have to use their servers) or their budget.

These limitations aren’t always bad. Shopify hosting is incredibly reliable. However, several other choices can completely cripple a business from the outset.

Budget hosting and SEO implications

If you opt for a budget hosting solution, you’re almost certainly going to be on what is known as a Shared Server. This is a web server in a datacentre that hosts vast numbers of websites.

It is very common for the number of websites to be in excess of 250,000 per server. That said, these are very powerful servers on the end of very fast internet connections (1Gb+).

If you’re a small business that offers services (and doesn’t actively take transactions online), and your website is purely informational, you might argue this doesn’t matter. However, there is a direct correlation between the speed of your website and your rankings on Google – and not just because speed is a ranking factor.

Does hosting speed directly impact SEO?

Consider this, if your website is slow to respond, it is likely to have a knock-on effect in respect of the following areas:

• Page experience overall (people won’t spend as long on your website)
• Bounce rate (people that visit one page on your site with no further interaction and then leave because they find it slow to load)

Let’s look at these in reverse. Bounce Rate, according to Google, is not a direct ranking factor and there have been several studies to support this, even to the extent of disproving that Bounce Rate is used as an indirect ranking factor.

However, think about it more laterally. If your visitors are leaving your site immediately, because of slow performance, then the website performance is affecting your SEO – because they’re not spending any time on your site and that could be because of their Page Experience.

Page Experience is a ranking factor for Google.

Right now, Google wants visitors to sites from search results to have a positive Page Experience and find the quality content they seek. If your pages are loading slowly or images aren’t showing as they should, then it makes sense that their Page Experience is a negative one.

What about the time it takes for a website to become interactive? i.e. the time before you can click on a link. We’ve all been there and know how frustrating it is. It is all considered in the Page Experience factor.

The impact on SEO from poor hosting is direct and damaging.

The cheapest of hosts tend to have poor “Uptime” too. That’s the time your website is actually visible, because they’re not on reliable servers or being as well maintained. If Google detects that your site isn’t accessible, what do you think that does to your SEO?

What about peak times in business?

I’ve not even mentioned the negative implications when you want to drive more visitors to your site than usual, such as:

• Sale events
• Announcements (even if you’re not as popular as Oasis)
• New products
• Peak seasonal times (Black Friday, Christmas, etc.)

Imagine the negative page experience if your hosting is poor when you most need it to be performing well?

Misinformation about hosting and SEO

There is, unfortunately, still some people denying that web hosting plays an important role in Google rankings. I despair when I read things like this in direct response to someone asking if changing their poor performing web host for a better one would impact their rankings:

Ultimately, if the person asking the question was suffering because of a poor hosting service, and they migrated to a good web hosting service, it would be very likely to affect their rankings – because the Page Experience would be likely to improve (on a like for like basis, being with a faster host with nothing on the website affecting the load time, there must be a speed improvement).

I wrote another blog about measuring the speed of a website and finding performance issues. If you were to use the resources on that article to measure the poor host, and then the same to measure the site on the good web host, some of the Core Web Vitals would be likely to have improved considerably. Those improved vitals are going to help with your SEO.

Fast hosting is likely to directly affect SEO

If you want to spend a little more on one thing that you know for certain has an impact on Google rankings, then having a good web hosting service is a great place to start.

Finally, I doubt that Oasis will have any issue selling their concert tickets ten times over, regardless of the unavailability of the website. Some brands don’t need to rely on SEO, and Oasis will probably just Roll With It.

Whether you’re a fan of the Gallagher brothers or not, feel free to leave feedback or share your own experiences with me in the comments.