With Cloud hosting, online collaboration from any location is now possible. For some people, the server location may be insignificant, but the server location & web hosting are relevant to SEO and overall user experience.
The host location of your website might affect your site’s speed and rankings. Every second count when it comes to speed and loading time is a major contributing factor for bounce rate.
If the page takes more than 3 seconds to load, the average user will leave that site. So, hosting servers can affect your loading speed. As such, if you want to boost your page speed, then you need to choose the server location accordingly.
HostGator offers you the option of choosing between the US and Indian server location with all hosting plans. Read this HostGator Review to learn more.
Does Hosting Server Location Affects Site’ SEO?
When it comes to SEO, there is a lot of things that you need to consider, which also includes your hosting server’s location. The further your server location is from your target audience, the more it will impact your site’s speed. Google also considers page load speed as an important ranking factor, as a faster website ensures a better user experience. Thus, let’s check out how hosting server location affects your site’s SEO in the blog post!
Contents
A. How the Location of the Web Server Affects the Speed?
Many networks use fiber optic cables for transferring data at the speed of light. With faster speed, for every 1000 km travelled, the user might experience a 10-millisecond delay which is insignificant.
If your website targets users of one particular country, then it’s advisable to host a server in that country. But, if your website gets visitors from all over the world, then using CDN (content delivery network) is an ideal option.
Most servers require time to process a request after its received, which is known as server latency. With servers working in different locations, the amount of time required to process the data increases, which can affect user experience.
Also, slow-loading pages are not good for high-ranking sites and can affect their conversion rate. Moreover, Google considers loading speed while ranking. Thus, if the loading time is slow, Google can lower your page ranking in SERP, which will affect your SEO campaign.
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B. How do Search Engines See the Location Servers?
When hosting a website, choosing the same location severs as targeting users is not important anymore. Google has started a feature that allows you to set a target country in tools. But this also depends on TDL. For websites like .org and .com, the website owner may need to set the target country using the webmaster’s tool.
If you don’t do this manually, the search engines will carry out the selection based on the IP address of the website. And, the information about the location will be available in the web content backlinks of the pages along with other relevant SEO information.
For instance, if your server is located in the States and your website is targeted to India. Then you’ll need to set India in the Google webmasters tool as your target country.
This can be done manually in other search engines like Bing and Yandex. Therefore, it is not important to host your server in India if you use a .in domain, you just need to follow the process of entering a location in the webmaster’s tool.
Further reading: What is Difference Between .COM and .CO Domain
C. Impact of Localized Web Hosting on the Speed
As mentioned above, the server location affects your site’s speed. So, the closer your visitors are to your data centre, the faster your website loads for them. In contrast, if the data centre is far, it will affect the loading time.
- A 1-second delay in the page loading can cause a 7% decrease in the conversion rate of an eCommerce site.
- More than 40% of visitors will leave a site that does not load after three seconds.
- According to research by Firefox, a 2.2-second improvement in the page speed will lead to a 15% increase in conversion rates.
Amazon – the biggest eCom giant – has calculated that a page could lose millions of sales if the loading time is slow. According to Google, if it slowdowns its search by four-tenths of seconds, it could lose about 8 million searches per day. That’s is quite a lot for a website to suffer because of speed.
D. Using the Content Delivery Network for Speed
CDN is a network of servers located worldwide. By using it, you can vastly improve your site’s speed. With your content distributed across many locations, your applications will be able to handle a higher traffic volume. Read here to learn more about the benefits of server virtualization.
Content Delivery Network not only creates a great website experience but also improves ranking and increases website traffic & sales. It takes the whole load off the server. If one location is not available, another location serves the content. So, the site speed is not affected.
The CDN system provides greater scalability. It also provides the benefit of reduced latency, which means that the closer you are to your end-user, the quicker your page will load.
To Sum up,
Response time is indeed a critical factor for search engine optimization. Localized hosting of the server directly affects the SEO. In short, if the user’s website is close to the server, then there won’t be any loading issues.
The physical location of your data centre affects the speed of your website. The loading speed of your site affects the performance of search results. When the hosting is local, you’ll be able to make hassle-free payments in your currency. You can also integrate different techniques to increase your website speed.
A site’s thorough audit will help you to know about the lags and issues that affect the website. To increase your site speed, you need to choose the right hosting options for your needs. You can also enable compression and reduce redirects to improve site speed. So, the next time you choose a hosting plan; do consider the location of the server.
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