Optimizing Your Web Hosting for SEO with a PaaS

Want to optimize your web hosting performance to succeed in SEO?

This article will give you all the details.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is key to improving the performance of your web applications.

We spoke with several experts, including Olivier Andrieu, one of the most prominent SEO specialists in France and author of the Abondance blog.

Whether you work in marketing or your CMO is pushing you to speed up your page load times, we will explain how to optimize your hosting for SEO.

In this article, we will walk you through everything you need to know, and we will also show you how Scalingo can help improve your website’s performance.

Why website performance is essential for SEO

If you are selling a product, you most likely want to drive traffic to your website in order to generate sales.

To attract organic traffic, you need to optimize your site for SEO. This means understanding how search engine algorithms such as Google or Bing rank websites.

In the case of Google, which accounts for more than 80% of global searches, one of the ranking factors is your site’s performance and page load speed.

In addition, a fast-loading website is more likely to convert users. You know it yourself, nothing is more frustrating than a slow website when you want to make a purchase or read content online.

The different ways web hosting impacts SEO performance

Web server caching

“Cache optimization is the factor that has the greatest impact on page load speed, in my experience.” Olivier Andrieu

Even with a very powerful server, executing the code required to load a resource takes time, and this can impact SEO.

That is why you should cache everything that can be cached:

Cache all static resources such as fonts, stylesheets, scripts, images, etc. Their loading should not rely on the application.

If images need to be resized and optimized before being served, cache all generated formats to avoid repeating this work on every request.

Cache full pages whenever possible. When that is not possible, try to cache parts of the page wherever you can.

Scalability for traffic spikes

“Undersized servers can impact your SEO performance.” Olivier Andrieu

There are several reasons that can cause traffic spikes:

You are mentioned on TV, during a livestream, or on Reddit.

Your activity increases significantly during certain times of the year, such as Black Friday.

These spikes are critical for your business, and if your infrastructure cannot scale, the financial impact can be significant.

Problems can come from several sources:

Your hosting has a bandwidth limit, and if you reach it unexpectedly during a spike, your site may become unavailable.

The server is undersized, and response times become too long for visitors to wait.

With these kinds of issues, the bounce rate can increase significantly and negatively affect user experience.

Server location for SEO: myths and realities

There was a time when a server’s IP address had an impact on SEO. Search engines would geolocate the IP and take it into account for local SEO.

This is no longer the case. Google has confirmed it.

However, there is still an advantage to hosting your server close to your audience. The farther the server is from users, the higher the latency.

If your audience is in France and your server is located in California, latency will be at least 150ms before the server even starts processing requests.

If the server is in France, this latency drops to less than 50ms. It may seem like a small difference, but Google recommends a total load time between 100ms and 200ms, so this difference is important.

High availability

Hosting that is regularly unavailable is a real issue.

Downtime should be reduced as much as possible, otherwise the impact on SEO will quickly be noticeable.

Of course, downtime frustrates users, but it also affects search engine crawlers.

If Google’s crawler finds your site unavailable, it can lead to SEO issues.

This is why availability should be carefully considered when choosing a hosting provider.

99% uptime may seem good, but it represents more than 7 hours of downtime per month.

By comparison, 99.9% uptime means less than one hour of downtime per month.

At Scalingo, we offer Database as a Service, and all our Business plans include high availability.

May 2021: Google Page Experience update and Core Web Vitals

Starting in May 2021, Google updated its algorithms with the Page Experience update. User experience is now part of its ranking criteria.

Google defined three metrics to evaluate a website’s performance, known as the Core Web Vitals.

As you can see, the “L” in LCP stands for Loading, which directly relates to page load speed and is influenced by your hosting.

“We are still waiting to see the exact impact of this update.” Olivier Andrieu

It is still difficult to measure the full impact of this update, but it is clear that faster loading speeds benefit users.

The different SEO hosting solutions and their advantages

Shared hosting

This type of hosting is often the cheapest, but it comes with several drawbacks.

Server resources are shared between all hosted websites, and this sharing is not strictly controlled. If one site uses too many resources, it can affect others.

Some providers also overload servers with too many websites to increase profitability, which leads to regular performance issues.

It is important to choose a reliable provider if you go with shared hosting.

In addition to performance issues, a poor hosting provider may not enforce strict rules on hosted content.

If you share an IP with websites involved in illegal activities, your site may be associated with a bad IP reputation, which can impact SEO.

VPS

With VPS, you still share a physical server with other users, but resource allocation is much stricter, so you are less likely to experience performance issues caused by others.

You also benefit from a dedicated IP, which avoids reputation issues.

You can increase or decrease your resources within minutes. This usually involves a short downtime while the VPS restarts, but scaling remains relatively simple.

Dedicated servers

With dedicated servers, you have full access to a physical server.

You do not share resources with other sites, and you have your own IP.

This usually provides the best performance. Virtualization does have a small impact on performance, but dedicated servers eliminate it.

However, scaling is more complex, and it is harder to handle traffic spikes quickly.

If a hardware issue occurs, for example if the CPU fails, your site can be unavailable for a significant amount of time unless you have redundancy in place. This is also a risk with VPS.

PaaS

With a Platform as a Service, you no longer need to worry about server management.

Resources are shared in a way similar to VPS, and even if the IP is shared, strict rules are in place to protect its reputation.

Unlike VPS and dedicated servers, redundancy is fully managed. If a server issue occurs, it is handled automatically, and your site is restored quickly without data loss.

How Scalingo can improve your website performance

In addition to the benefits described above, Scalingo offers other advantages that help improve SEO performance.

Scale without downtime

With Scalingo, you can increase or decrease your resources in just a few clicks, or even automatically, without downtime.

In practice, you adjust the size of your containers, and your application is redeployed on the new infrastructure.

One-click deployments

Scalingo allows you to deploy applications in one click. For example, you can deploy WordPress instantly.

With one click, your WordPress site is online and configured to scale easily, including storing uploaded files in cloud storage.

Operational excellence

Using a PaaS means outsourcing system administration. This allows you to focus on what brings the most value, but only if the service is reliable.

This is why Scalingo focuses on operational excellence. We work to provide the best possible experience, with high availability, regular updates of runtimes and databases, strong security, and more.

We also place a strong emphasis on high-quality developer support. Our median response time is 10 minutes, and our support team is made up of engineers.

We know how important it is for developers to get quick answers so their work is not blocked.

Finally: think user first

For us, a slow website is first and foremost a user experience issue, more than just an SEO issue.

Before thinking about SEO, your hosting should first serve your users.

SEO performance should not be the only factor when improving your website and hosting.

If your pages take too long to load, user experience will suffer, and your users will not enjoy using your site.

Conclusion

Website performance is becoming increasingly important for SEO and organic visibility.

However, optimization should not be driven only by SEO, but by improving user experience.

To achieve this, you should focus on the following:

Web server caching

Scalability for traffic spikes

Server location

A PaaS like Scalingo can help you address all of these aspects.

Finally, as Google continues to evolve its algorithms, user experience will become even more important.

Photo by Luke Chesser and Merakist on Unsplash