Although all businesses know that the structure of a website is essential and that the content you use, both inbound and outbound, has a huge impact on your rankings with the search engines, many people aren’t aware of just how hosting can affect their rankings as well. In fact, there are several points to be considered when choosing a hosting company because the right company can help you climb the SERPs quite quickly and a bad or inadequate hosting service can cost your rank just as quickly. Here are a few points to consider if you aren’t sure why hosting matters.

Uptime Downtime

Although it would be unrealistic to believe that you will never experience any downtime, the truth of the matter is that everything is subject to an occasional problem here and there but the operative word here is ‘occasional.’ Google and the search engines will not fault a website for that random few minutes that a site goes down for some unforeseen reason such as an act of nature or other event that isn’t the result of poor hosting. If your site is up 99.999% of the time, then you won’t get tons of bounces and your bounce rate should fall within the acceptable range. That is, if all other factors are in place to keep people on your site such as a great web design and informative content. Smart Hosting is a company that can guarantee that uptime and has a track record to prove it.

Speed Is Critical

Next on the list of those things that matter in a web hosting company is speed. Visitors won’t stick around 15 minutes for a page to load and once they are there and the page starts loading, if they get frustrated and bounce off back to the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) then you can be certain Google will count that as a bounce. While there is some amount of contention as to whether or not bounce rate really impacts a site, Google says it most definitely does. Get a hosting company that doesn’t have the resources to handle all the hosting packages they sell and you are, again, at a loss. Each and every bounce will count statistically against you and this will impact your website analysis.

Dashboards and Content Management Systems

Finally, the other biggie when it comes to website analysis are the features you have available to you to add function for your visitors. Widgets and other plugins are crucial to a user-friendly site and can enable you to rank quite highly because each time a visitor clicks on one of your handy little widgets, taking them through to another page on your site, you get a gold star. Some hosting companies don’t offer the amount of tools you need to develop a site that is user friendly or with a dashboard that is accessible enough for you to make changes as needed.

The bottom line is that website analysis is all about the traffic you generate and how long you can keep them there browsing around. If you are an e-commerce site that finalises transactions from your site, each and every sale you make also counts towards your overall score. A smart hosting company will have all the tools you need to develop a website that will keep visitors on your site as well as the speed and reliability it takes to ensure they can access your pages quickly an consistently. That’s why hosting is a key component in website analysis and why it’s important that you understand why it matters.