The Direct Link Between Managed Web Hosting and SERPs:
When you run a WordPress website for your business, your goal is to achieve visibility and trustworthiness among internet users. The first step is going through search engines; mainly Google. You want your pages to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) and to rank within the top results.
Higher search rankings boost the likelihood of users clicking, reading, and becoming a lead or customer on your pages.
However, staying competitive in Google SERPs is harder than it sounds. Google is always changing the rules for ranking websites. Recently, they have focused more on how well a webpage works technically, not just its good content. This means that the quality of your web hosting matters almost as much as the design of your website.
Today, we’re taking a deep dive into how managed web hosting can impact your SERP ranking, and how they work together.
Google’s Core Web Vitals and Your Website’s SERP Ranking
Google’s recent algorithm updates have focused extensively on website page performance. It has always prioritized fast, responsive websites over slow, clunky sites, and this has only grown more predominant over time.
Nowadays, mobile website performance is crucial for businesses to rank well. They must meet the performance requirements to ensure good mobile performance. However, the most recent major update in 2021 introduced the Core Web Vitals. These measure specific user-experience-based website performance metrics.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – how long it takes for the main page content to visually load.
- First Input Delay (FID) – how long until users can interact with the page
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – how much the page jumps around as it loads
Achieving these standards has proven difficult for some businesses who never considered things like layout shift before. But as a veteran internet user, you know how much that can really matter in your reader experience.
What Managed Web Hosting Provides
How does managed web hosting make a difference when your goal is top-of-class SEO and SERP ranking?
Managed service takes care of all the basic infrastructure and support required to run a website on a monitored server.
The level of support for your managed web hosting can vary depending on the service you choose. It can range from a basic virtual server and support to monitoring and software updates.
- Optimized Load Balancing
- Distributed Hosting and Availability
- Physical Security at Data Centers
- Security Services and Defense Features
- Server Configuration, Maintenance, and Monitoring
- Application Support
- Responsive Technical Support
- Backups and Disaster Recovery
Highly Responsive Web Pages
Google rewards responsive web pages. It wants your first input to be available in less than 100 milliseconds. Managed web hosting offers fast servers that meet performance requirements for competing for the top spot on search engine results pages.
Distributed Availability for Global Users
Some web hosts use a distributed cloud network to provide low-latency global availability of your content. Your data is copied on servers in various regions to decrease the time it takes for users worldwide to receive it. This means that your website will be able to rank for fast response times for online visitors who live in distant regions from where you might have hosted locally.
Mobile-Ready Hosting
Any website that wants to rank today needs to perform well on mobile devices. A managed web host does not create your site’s mobile code, but it can improve your website’s performance for mobile users. It does this by supporting their queries. By enhancing your website’s mobile performance, you increase your chance at a top SERP ranking.
Scalable Server Resources that Adapt to Traffic Demand
One thing that managed web hosting does well is scalability. Scaling in web hosting means spinning up or allocating more server resources when traffic to your website increases. If you have certain times during the day when there is much more web traffic or if your marketing efforts are suddenly wildly successful, your managed web host will make sure there’s enough server resources for everyone to enjoy your website without it crashing.
Web hosts can also protect you from problems like denial-of-service attacks where a hacker will flood your website with unexpected traffic, which leads us to server security.
Safe Browsing Environment for Visitors
Of course, your web host is also responsible for keeping your browsers safe. Managed web hosting can provide both physical security at the hosting server level, and sometimes software security at the website level. Managed web hosting services will provide security measures to ensure that visitors to your site are safe from hacker antics.
Update Configurations as Demands Change
Your managed web host can help update configurations and software installations if your website’s needs change. They will ensure that your website is able to meet its evolving needs.
Often a business will start on a budget hosting level, then may need to upgrade to cloud VPS hosting. Then from there, if traffic increases, you want to go to to a dedicated hosting server. You may want to add features, defend from specific malware attacks, or adapt to a higher rate of daily traffic. Your web host can help reconfigure your web server to provide for these requirements and more.
Solve Web Hosting Problems Fast
If your web hosting server has an issue, a managed web host provides valuable support to help you fix it.
Managed hosting means that the host provides professional support to ensure your website performs smoothly. They will be available to help you with any hosting, data serving, or security issues immediately. A Managed web hosting service will work with tech support on your behalf. This will minimize the impact of these problems.
Rapidly Load from Backups
A managed web host will regularly back up your website. AIM Retail Partners offers daily backups for clients, for example. This allows you to easily restore it using a recent backup if anything goes wrong.
Sometimes files corrupt during a routine software updates. Sometimes a website is hacked. If an update push just doesn’t work, it’s easy to restore a recent working version of your website. Your host will make sure that they are taking regular backups so a recent version is always available.
How does this help your SERP? The website is always fixed quickly with backup recovery protocols. This ensures that users always see a working website when they visit.
Achieve Your SERP Goals with Managed Web Hosting
If you are considering the best way to host your business website and how to reach the top of SERP rankings, managed web hosting is a good plan. Managed web hosting has access to great resources, scalability, and professional support in a pinch. You can improve your website’s performance, reduce latency, ensure security, enjoy regular backups, and get expert support to keep your website performing in the top tier by search engine standards.
