Best Web Hosting is essential for a website’s availability and success.
Website speed and SEO are crucial factors, but the location of the hosting servers is often underestimated. Server location affects loading speed and search engine rankings.
In this article, we’ll discuss how server location affects website performance and SEO, including its impact on website speed, user experience, search engine rankings, and local visibility.
What is Server Location, and why is it important?
Server location denotes the physical location of the data center or server where your website’s files and data are stored.
It is important because it can impact various aspects of website performance. The geographical distance between the server and the website users affects loading times, latency, and overall user experience.
Additionally, server location may have implications for security, compliance with legal regulations, and hosting costs. Choosing an optimal server location ensures fast and reliable access to your website content.
Server’s Hardware Component:
- CPU
- Memory
- Storage
- Connectivity Adapters
- Hard Drives
- Power Supply Units
Server’s Software Component:
- Operating System (Linux, Windows, macOS, Unix, Ubuntu, etc.)
- Server Application
How Does Server Location Affect Website Performance and SEO?
The hosting server’s location affects its response time.
Opting for servers closer to your target audience results in faster response times & a smoother browsing experience.
This choice is particularly critical for websites with a global audience, as they aim to minimize user delays worldwide.
Now, let’s explore how distance can impact speed by comparing the delay in data transfer in two distinct geographical locations.
The following images display the number of data hops (destinations for our data) and the total time it takes for a user to reach Harvard University’s main website from two different locations.
By tracing the requested route from the western part of Asia to another in America, it’s evident that Harvard University’s primary servers are located in Boston, Massachusetts, in the northeastern United States.
The closer a user is to this location, the fewer data hops their request will go through, illustrating the interconnectedness of location and speed.
The closer a user is to this location, the fewer data hops their request will need to pass through; this illustrates the interplay between location and speed.
Latency and Website Speed
The distance between the server & website visitors is vital in deciding how long data takes to travel.
Generally, longer distances mean more latency and, as a result, slower website loading.
Placing a server near your audience reduces latency, leading to quicker page loads, a better user experience, and the possibility of better search engine rankings.
Latency in forex trading is measured in milliseconds, and in the highly dynamic forex market, even milliseconds hold significant value.
Thus, achieving minimal latency is essential for traders looking to secure prices before significant market shifts occur swiftly.
Content Delivery
The connection between server location and content delivery is profound.
For websites targeting a global audience, strategically placing servers in different regions or utilizing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is essential.
This ensures content is delivered from the nearest server to users, reducing latency, improving website performance, and ensuring faster loading times, regardless of the visitor’s location.
How Server location affects SEO rankings
Optimizing page speed has a direct impact on reducing bounce rates.
Bounce rates, often referred to as single-page sessions, occur when visitors land on a website page but quickly exit without initiating further requests.
Websites with slow loading times will have an increased bounce rate.
For example, increasing the page load time from 1 second to 3 seconds can cause a 32% rise in the bounce rate.
Page speed also significantly enhances the overall user experience. Fast-loading sites have longer dwell times (the time users spend on a web page).
Moreover, faster-loading websites are more accessible to search engine crawlers; crawling is the process by which search engines discover updated content, including new web pages, websites, or modifications to existing content. So, website crawlers and bots crawl your site regularly to ensure proper indexing and ranking.
The connection between your site speed, server location, and SEO rankings is linked. Search engines allow the selection of target regions, enabling geo-targeting and using region-specific keywords. A well-suited server hosting location can substantially enhance your website’s loading speed.
How to select the best location for your server (hosting)?
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Identify Your Target Audience:
Identify the primary geographic regions of your main audience. For example, if your website primarily serves United States users, consider hosting your server in a data center located in a major United States city.
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Leverage Content Delivery Networks (CDNs):
Use CDNs to distribute your website’s content to various server locations across the globe. For example, if you operate a global e-commerce site, implementing a CDN can help deliver content from servers in the United States, Asia, and Europe, guaranteeing quicker loading speeds for users in each region.
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Conduct Server Response Time Tests:
You can conduct server response time tests from various regions using tools like Pingdom or GTMetrix before deciding on the location.
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Consider Scalability and Redundancy:
Choose a hosting provider with scalable solutions and redundancy options.
How Search Engines Interpret Server Location
Search engines like Google have established specific criteria for ranking websites. Their search algorithms evaluate numerous factors, including the website’s relevance, usability, the expertise of information sources, location, and user settings.
Search engines like Google & Bing have adopted a globalized approach that includes geo-targeting. Businesses with servers located overseas utilize webmaster tools to specify their target country.
If you still need to designate a target country, search engines will consider other factors like the server’s IP address, backlinks, and content for ranking purposes.
Google now prioritizes ccTLDs (country code top-level domains) over server location in search results. Relevance plays a key role, so having a domain-specific to a region can contribute to higher rankings for your website.
Nevertheless, the server’s location remains crucial regarding site speed and response times, which can significantly impact user experience.
Geo-Targeting and its Importance
Geo-targeting, or local pay-per-click (PPC), focuses on delivering content to users according to their physical location.
It allows marketers to provide targeted ads and personalized content to individuals within a specified geographical area.
This advertising approach empowers marketers to provide precise targeted ads and personalized content directly to individuals within a specified geographical region.
Geo-targeting relies on understanding a consumer’s current or past location to deliver the most relevant message to the right individual at the ideal moment, ultimately boosting sales for businesses.
Geo-targeting ensures that advertisements or promotions align with a consumer’s location, reducing unproductive clicks and impressions and enabling a more efficient allocation of marketing resources, optimizing the budget.
How Does DNS Service Affect SEO?
A domain Name System (DNS) can impact SEO results in various ways. Some of these factors are apparent, while others could be more straightforward. Let us delve into them individually.
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Availability
Encountering DNS outages can harm your site’s SEO. Search bots face challenges accessing your site during such incidents, causing reporting delays.
This results in postponed indexing of new pages, adversely impacting your site’s availability and potentially leading to a decline in its search engine ranking.
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Multiple Locations
A DNS provider can offer multiple points of presence (PoPs) where you can set up name servers.
This approach significantly enhances the speed for visitors by shortening the route between them and the name servers.
Having 30 or more PoPs is far superior to just a few, leading to improved performance and availability.
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DNS Migration
When executing a DNS migration, it is crucial to follow the correct procedures to avoid disruptions for users and search engine bots.
Problems may arise if the TTL values of the previous DNS records are too high.
These DNS records may persist for an extended period in the DNS caches of recursive name servers.
Until these caches are updated, they will continue to point to the previous address, potentially resulting in downtime.
Site loading speed
The DNS process occurs before a website loads in a visitor’s browser, and the resolution time can affect the overall user experience.
Opting for a dependable DNS provider, with an average delay of approximately 20 milliseconds globally, contrasts with relying on the domain registrar alone, potentially causing delays of 200 to 500 milliseconds.
This choice significantly influences the speed and responsiveness of the website for users.
Measure Network latency
1. Ping
Ping is a commonly used latency assessment tool accessible on various operating systems. It calculates the round-trip time (RTT) between your personal computer and the specific destination you define, a domain or an IP address.
RTT corresponds to the duration it takes for the ping packet to reach its destination and then return with the response, providing insights into the overall delay in receiving a response from servers, PCs, routers, or internet sites.
2. Traceroute
The Traceroute command functions as a network diagnostic tool that traces packets’ routes from the source to a specified destination.
It reveals the IP addresses of the routers or servers (hops) along the path and the duration for the packets to reach each hop.
Traceroute is commonly used to troubleshoot network connectivity issues and identify latency or routing problems.
You can test latency Using Ping and Traceroute: https://www.accuwebhosting.com/resources/network-speed-test.
Conclusion
The server location plays a key role in website performance and SEO.
Hosting a server near the target audience leads to faster loading times & an enhanced user experience.
Additionally, the choice of server location impacts network traffic routes and can significantly affect website speed and connectivity.
When optimizing server locations for SEO, consider crucial factors like DNS resolution times, availability, multiple locations, and proper DNS migration.
This ensures minimal disruptions and enhanced site performance.
