What Google Thinks Of Your Website

A website is a vital part of a company’s online presence but all websites are not equal in Google’s eyes. Healthcare providers and medical facilities are looked at differently than other industries like restaurants or clothing stores. Google’s algorithm takes into consideration many things and where a domain is hosted is one of them.

Fast is good

One of the primary components of how Google values a website in the index is the speed of the website. More specifically, how fast does a website load in a web browser when requested by a user. Google considers this metric carefully and awards sites with a fast load time with a higher rank.

When being frugal is costly

The cheap, budget hosting solutions will provide space on a server that will serve a website decently for the time being. The problem is, the website will be sharing that server with literally thousands of other websites. That’s how the budget host can offer those $10 a month deals. To the average business owner, this is a budget-conscious decision.

Not if but when

For those who know better, budget hosting solutions are a nightmare waiting to happen. When one of the thousand other sites on that server gets a spike in traffic, all of the other websites being hosted on that server are affected. This is called having a noisy neighbor on the server. All other websites sharing that server then load slowly and those sites can and will get dinged by Google for slow page load speed. This is a known factor in overcrowded hosting servers and is inevitable.

Page load speed and SEO

Google will penalize a website in the search index for slow page load speed because speed dramatically affects a user’s experience. Remember, Google is in the business of getting a user to a specific answer for a search query to a website that offers the best in terms of content and performance. A website can have great content but if a page load takes 10 seconds to load a page Google will recognize that delay and penalize the site accordingly. Search engine optimization and page load speed are joined at the hip. There is zero wiggle room on this front.

What’s a better hosting solution?

Choosing a host for a healthcare website that has a powerful and robust data center solution is the first step in ensuring that the site runs at optimal speed. There are excellent hosting options that are available at very competitive prices. These hosts will provide outstanding infrastructure and technical support as well. These solutions will often come with caching options and content delivery networks (CDNs) to further increase speed and site performance. This is money well spent for a business and Google will reward the business owner with a higher valuation in the search index.