Setting up your site involves crucial decisions on a number of different items. You must select the right platform, appropriate tags and best technologies to support your site. But one of the most important steps in creating a functional site is choosing the right host.
Before we get into the specifics of hosting sites, it’s important to establish the right platform. We recommend building most websites on WordPress. Nearly 25% of all sites are constructed on the WordPress platform, including tech titans Google and Facebook. WordPress is both secure and user-friendly. It also supports useful plugins, and search engines love it. So before you chose a host, chose WordPress!
Why Good Hosting Matters:
Speed — Load times go a long way in determining key performance indicators (KPIs), such as bounce rates and conversion rates, on your page. The better your page performs in these KPIs, the better you rank on search engines. With a site that lags behind, you’re missing out on traffic. Speed is determined by many different variables, so choosing the quickest host is a great way to increase visits.
Reliability — Having your site crash or become inaccessible for even a brief period of time can hurt your rankings. All the speed in the world doesn’t matter if your site is down, and SEO penalties are sure to follow as long as the problem goes unattended. The more reliable and well maintained a server is, the better. A host with backup servers and attendants decreases the chances your site goes down.
Plugin Support — A host server that supports a variety of different plugins gives you the freedom to add tools to make your site, thus making it more user-friendly and increasing traffic. Partnering with a host site that doesn’t can cause portions of your site to malfunction, in turn, hurting your rankings.
Our Recommendation:
With all things being equal, sites with the same code and content might perform differently on different hosting sites. Choosing the right one matters a great deal. We recommend several that are great options, and most will handle 85% of all hosting needs.
As a full-service digital marketing agency, we know what it takes to build a site from scratch designed with good SEO principles in mind. Over the past 12 years, we’ve helped businesses of all size reach new heights online through a multitude of services such as content generation, social media engagement, web design and development and more.
Give us a call for a free site audit today!