Introduction
It has always been said to pick the best and most reliable web hosting server for your website. This is because web hosting is the fundamental element on which your website’s performance and growth remain dependent. While there are countless web hosting services available as of today’s date, it becomes a bit complex to opt for a web hosting server that is most suitable for your website. The more specific you become with your choices by analyzing your web business necessities and purpose, the better you can amplify the web hosting server options.
However, there are times when even after examining deeply the website’s owners overlook one key factor and that is, the location of the web hosting server. The web hosting server has much more role to play apart from letting you narrow down your web hosting choices. When it comes to optimizing your website for popular search engines such as Google, server location gets to count in along with other numerous things.
In this article, you will learn about how the location of the server for website hosting highly matters for Google-like search engines and SEO. Further, you will also acquire insights into how server location impacts various elements of a website’s functioning. Dive into the subsequent section to get started.
How Does the Location of the Server Impact Website Speed?
The web hosting server is capable of determining and influencing the loading speed of your website. When you run a certain business through your website, you surely target a certain type of audience based on your content, product, or services. And, it is an undeniable fact that the further your server will be from your target audience, the longer it will take for your website to load for them.
The highest percentage of networks employ fiber-optic cables in the current times. These cables can transfer data approximately at the speed of light, which is 3 x 10^8 m/s. So, if your website’s data travels at this speed, for every 1000 kilometers traveled, your website’s user might only encounter a ten-millisecond delay. And, this amount of delay is entirely negligible for an end-user experience.
For instance, if your website’s visitors are in the USA, it is better to keep your hosting there too. Also, if your web server is slow, Google will generate the judgment and assume that your website is slow as well. Therefore, your website’s rankings will be penalized by Google due to the speed issue.
Google search engine attempts to make sure that it provides the best results for the user’s keywords. These best results include faster loading of web pages. The Google co-founders put a great emphasis on really fast searching. Thus, faster web pages eventually rank better than slower ones on Google.
The Effect on Website Speed Through the Local Web Server Hosting Services
As you have learned in the previous section, local web hosting services help in increasing the loading speed of your website. Your website will load faster for visitors who are close to your website’s data center. The time taken by a server for receiving and processing the request of your website’s user is termed latency. The latency tends to increase if the server is located in a distinct continent from where the user resides. Consequently, this affects the web page load time adversely.
Some Significant Facts About Website Speed
Have a glance at the following points that tell about some of the major facts related to the website’s speed.
- If there is even a one-second delay when it comes to page loading, you can suffer a 7% reduction in the conversion rate of your business website.
- Around forty percent of the total visitors will drop your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- According to Firefox research, one can observe around a 15% increment in the conversion rates when the page speed is improved by up to 2.2 seconds.
- As per the analysis of Amazon, the slowing down of a web page for just 1 second can cost it approx $1.6 billion in sales every year.
- For Google, if the search results speed drops just four-tenths of a second, it can lose up to 8 million searches per day. This implies that it will not be able to serve millions of online ads.
How Do Search Engines see Server Location?
It is more crucial to opt for the server for website hosting near your target audience than ensuring that the web pages are delivered faster even via the closest server or CDN (content delivery network). The principal search engines such as Google and Bing let the website owners pick a country target via their webmaster tools.
In case your website’s domain name is already enrolled with a country TLD. Then you can not opt for any target country. This is because the Google search engine connects the TLDs with a particular country location. For example, .uk is for the United Kingdom.
However, if you provide your website with the TLD such as .org or .com, then you can designate a target country in webmaster tools. Suppose, you do not specify the target country, Google and other search engines will make the choice based on the given below factors –
- Server IP address
- Web Page Backlinks
- The mentioned information on the website, which includes contact information, content snippets, etc.
- Backlinks to the web page.
- Other data relevant to local SEO
Furthermore, if you target an audience from all over the world, it is not necessary to choose any specific server location. But for quick page loading, make sure you pick the best hosting server and render the website through a CDN.
Is Server Location Essential for GEO Targeting?
While utilizing the different ways of geo-targeting like ccTLD or Webmaster Tools Geo-targeting tool, you are not required to bother about the server location. However, you will have to ensure that you host your website in such a way that your users can access it at the fastest speed.
We, at Hostbillo web hosting company, provide a cheap hosting server in numerous locations of every continent to let our clients make the best choice. Our every data center’s services make sure to enable your website to deliver a seamless end-user experience.
Also Read: Free vs Paid Web Hosting: What’s the Difference?
Conclusion
Your server’s physical location directly impacts your website’s loading speed and thus, your website’s SEO ranking. Further, the fast-loading web pages not only help to acquire a better website’s search engine ranking but they contribute towards many more aspects. Some of the significant benefits of the fast-loading web pages we can conclude are –
- Your website’s visitors will not have to wait for long to access the data of your website. With the progressing digital world, no Internet user anyway waits for more than two to three seconds for a website to load.
- The possibility increases that your website’s visitors might return to your website later as well.
- You get the opportunity to turn more website visitors into your customers.
- Moreover, your existing customers wish to stick longer with your website due to its fast-loading speed.
- This way you can sustain and draw an increasing number of users towards your website and generate greater profit.
- If you provide the required product, content, or service to your target audience with a high web page loading speed, they will not hop to your competitors in the web market. This will help you to intensify your brand image on the internet and come to the forefront. Also, in the later stages of your growing business, you can then target various ranges of audiences as well.
