Being an SEO first website, some of the key elements that are important when it comes to high-performance are speed, loading time, security and uptime from a web hosting perspective. Focusing on these aspects and ensuring that regular optimization is done keeping these aspects in place means half of your SEO work done successfully. If you have a managed SEO provider or are thinking of having one for your website, they too will suggest you this first before you dive into doing SEO strategies or making grand plans for traffic acquisition.
This is why, choosing a web hosting provider that understand the importance of websites, their performance and the benefit a website gets with good SEO is critical. With this article, we will try to understand how you can buy an SEO-friendly hosting in order to run a profit-making e-commerce business online.
How you can buy an SEO-friendly hosting?
1. Guarantee of high uptime
Your host’s time guarantee can be the most important factor because they are SEO friendly. Opening hours indicate the percentage of time your site is online and accessible. The longer you work, the less likely visitors are to visit your site to find it gone, send it back to search engines, and risk your rankings. Better and more reliable hosts offer a much longer time guarantee.
For best results, select a host with at least a 99.9% uptime guarantee (or higher if you get one.) However, watch out for any host that claims 100 percent of the time. There is always an outage which is a part of maintenance. The key lies for a provider when they keep the down time as short as possible. This way, it will not affect your website’s SEO performance. So, while making a purchase ask your provider about its uptime guarantees.
2. Server location
While the uptime refers to the content of your site that users have access to, the location of your server can determine how easily users can access the content on your site. If you use a shared, VPS, or dedicated server hosting plan, your site is hosted on a physical server in the data center in one place (unlike cloud hosting, where your data is stored in the cloud).
Basically, you want the data center to be as close as possible to most visitors to your site. The further your server is, the longer it will take to load your site. Server placement can also look bad in search engines, which can affect your SEO and hence the profitability of your ecommerce business online. If you operate in one country but use a host located somewhere the middle of the world, chances are that content requested and page loading may take a lot of time and affect your business.
Best is to have hosting servers that are fast and that their performance to be further improved with the help of content delivery network (CDN).
3. Security options
SEO and website security go hand in hand. In addition to the hosting itself, many hosting companies offer a selection of additional security plugins and that can be used to upgrade your website. Below are some SEO friendly things should look at to ensure your ecommerce business receives a much needed boost keeping security as an important factor.
- Automatic backup: In case of problems, you need a website backup that can be easily restored. Make sure your host offers automatic backups for free or for an additional fee.
- SSL: HTTPS has been a game changer for many years. If you haven’t had SSL for your website, it is about time that you do. Make sure your host supports SSL. Some even include it for free in their hosting plans and allow us to tell you that this SSL is a sign of trust when a user comes to your website and sees a secure sign. This only helps them to trust your site and do business with you.
4. A good and responsive support team
If you do not have your own site, we recommend that you fix it immediately. This usually includes talking to someone who is helpful.
A good host provides free support 24/7. Check the working hours of a potential host’s support team to learn how to do this. Do they have a phone number, live chat or email? Also check their social profiles. Web hosts interested in helping their customers can make extensive use of customer support on social media, perhaps even through their own Twitter support account. All this helps to take your business concerns through the right channel and address issues immediately and cause less friction when it comes to customer relationships and queries.
All this and much more
Please don’t forget to ask your hosting provider about plans when it comes to scale. Once you start getting the traffic, you will come across the option or should we say the stage where you want a better plan. In that situation, your hosting provider must be able to give you a better plan and upgrade it instantaneously without being a hindrance to your business website and its profitability.
