The SEO benefits of switching your website hosting provider.

When you we’re looking for your website hosting provider did you check to see if using them would improve your websites SEO status?

If not then you should really take a few minutes to see they tick all of these boxes.

Geo Location of your server IP

Does the location of the server that is hosting your website show as a UK IP address? Not having your website hosted on a UK Geo-located IP address could drag down your SEO results for UK traffic. If you are targeting your website to the UK market then this is a must have. Hosting your UK website on a USA based IP address, for example, will be handing a small but significant benefit to your competitors that do host on UK IP’s.

You can easily check the location of the servers IP address by entering it in the search field on MaxMind. If the result shows anything other than the UK then its time to move web hosting provider.

Website Speed.

Does your website load as quickly as possible? The longer it takes to load the sooner people leave, you start to loose traffic after just 3 seconds of loading. Make sure all of your images are optimised for web use – resize large images especially if you use an expensive digital camera as they will be many times larger than your computer screen. Make sure you remove anything not essential to your website – do you really need music and animated gifs?

If your website is still loading slowly then its time to look at your website hosting again. If your website is being hosted half way across the world then every request for each page item (every image, style-sheet etc) is having to be fetched from too far away. Move to a website hosting provider that is closer to your target audience. If your website hosting provider is good then they should have a service called CloudFlare. Enabling this service will essentially allow all of your static website items (images and style-sheets) to be loaded from one of the worlds fastest content delivery networks. Essentially your visitors will be fetching those items from a data centre close to where they are regardless of your websites location. CloudFlare also caches items which improves loading speed greatly especially for higher traffic websites.

Overloaded web servers.

If you use a very cheap website hosting provider then they obviously need to have host more websites per server to be able to turn a profit. This is great for you since you get cheap hosting but what about after 6 months when the server you were on when you started has now been filled up with many more thousands of websites all using resources.

Your website is probably showing signs of slowing down and it will only get worse. All good website hosting providers know the limits on their servers but the best ones will actively manage this to ensure that every customer gets a great experience.

We use our own servers so we know exactly how many sites are being hosted. We also limit the number of sites that are hosted on each server so that we never have an issue with overloaded resources.

You can easily check to see how many other websites are being hosted along side your own by using a site such as this.

If you see many thousands of sites then it could be a sign to look for a new hosting provider.