Improve your Prestashop website’s SEO with great web hosting

If you project to create a Prestashop website for your business, web hosting is one of the most important aspects to consider. Web hosting will influence your website’s accessibility, your website’s security, your website’s speed and so on. But, did you know that premium hosting solutions can also influence your Prestashop website’s SEO?

There is a lot more to SEO than text, link building and keywords. There are many tasks that website owners can do to make a significant difference in how their website ranks in search results. However, choosing the right web hosting solution for your website can boost your traffic more than you think.

Here are some tips on how web hosting can improve your SEO on your Prestashop website:

Make the user’s experience a priority!

In SEO (Search Engine Optimization), there is a concept that targets the page-load speed : the faster it loads, the better it is for the user. Load speed is one of the priorities of all websites, but the efficiency and success of a Prestashop website does not depend entirely on loading speed. SEO is mainly for the users and potential buyers who visit your website. It’s about what they want, what they need and whether your website actually delivers the goods as it should do.

Did your visitors find what they wanted? Did the right pages load fast enough? It is essential that visitors see your site’s main content quicker than anything else. The “secondary” content can take longer to load, that has little to no influence on the rankings. This concept is called First Meaningful Paint. It’s a factor in how your site ranks because it gives your visitors what they want and Google really like it.

Then, while the page-load process may be three seconds long, your visitors will see all your significant content in one and a half seconds. This happens because the elements that take longer to load are not crucial for the immediate visitor experience. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest or Twitter logos can take longer to load, it has little impact. From the user’s perspective, the load will remain under 2 seconds.

Once the user is on your Prestashop website, keeping them there is your main goal. If Google sees visitors to a certain page and then, they leave after only a short while, it means that the website doesn’t deliver what the visitor is looking for. If you have a slow website or unimportant content, it can bounce your users right back to their search results, and you certainly don’t want that to happen.

Uptime is fundamental (so is the right hosting solution!)

Another major aspect of a high-quality user experience is uptime. If a user or Google requests your website and it’s always timing out or the server can’t return results, then your user’s experience will be disappointing and will not encourage the user to come back. Make sure that you have as close to 100 % uptime as possible, to offer a memorable user experience to all your visitors. Not only will this improve your conversion rate, but your users are more likely to come back and recommend your site to their friends!

There are two load-time factors that Google uses to measure your site and both can be modified by your hosting solution. The first is DNS lookup. The longer it needs for your web host to complete DNS lookup, the longer it may take for your host to start loading your page. Longer look up time can affect your site rank and your user will end buying from the competition.

The second factor is page load time. If your hosting solution uses a slow and obsolete server, you may be in trouble. If your server takes longer than a hundred milliseconds to load their first byte, this is never good for your site traffic and conversion rates. Generally, the ideal time it should take to the server to answer a browser’s request should be half of that, so 50 milliseconds at most.

Check out our ideas for brand-new SEO strategies!

If you are ready to implement SEO strategies to boost your traffic, conversion rates, and sales, we have some amazing and easy ideas for you:

• Always use clean code: Even the best hosting solution cannot save your website from poorly written code that slows down your load time and can affect your user experience. Make sure that you keep all codes light and clean. JavaScript, extra CSS and all the files that are not necessary for your website to load don’t belong in your code. Finally, be sure that your code is W3C compliant by using a markup validation service.
• Improve your website’s security: This is a story we’ve all heard before: a business manager who thought he had good security with his hosting provider, gets hacked regularly, hackers adding malevolent links to the website without the owner noticing. Of course, Google catches this website with unrelated links and penalizes the website’s search rank for it. To avoid this difficult situation, you must work proactively to keep bad links and hackers away. Choose a web hosting provider with an impeccable reputation to help you keep those hackers at bay.Measure your website’s loading speed and time to first byte : When picking your web hosting provider, they usually can provide you with a tool that can help you find out how long it really takes to your Prestashop website to load and communicate with all the browsers. You can test from every region!
• Consider managed hosting: When choosing managed hosting, like its names says, it makes the management of the users’ experience a lot easier. It addresses many issues that website owners generally have. Also, with managed hosting, you are paying someone else to worry about the SEO-critical backend of your website. When professionals take care of your web hosting, it also means that you are ready for the unforeseen, like a spike in traffic or an unpleasant visit by hackers.They can also handle your hosting and security solution. It will give you more time to create great content and do amazing work for all your users and potential users to attract them to your Prestashop e-commerce or website.
• Uptime and downtime: Even the best web host servers cannot guarantee 100 % uptime. Unpredicted things can happen along the way and it’s perfectly normal. Most prominent web hosting companies will usually boast “five nines” uptime, meaning, 99.9999%. There will always intermittent downtime when your website will not be available for users, visitors, and search spiders. You can only hope for the lowest downtime possible from your web hosting provider.Also, the uptime/downtime of your web host mostly depends on the resources used for its servers. The higher the server specs, the more expensive your subscription will be. But, in the long-term, it will be money well invested.
• Website availability: One other feature that can influence your search engine rankings and conversion is your website’s availability. Most search engines and especially Google, don’t appreciate redirecting their visitors and users to websites that are not available. This is why they check and can remove (at least temporarily) from the index websites that have availability issues.

Your website’s availability is the responsibility of your web hosting providers. Failure to do so will result in damaging your online reputation and lead to poor rankings and conversion.

Web Hosting Server Location / Benefits of local web hosting

If you wish to drive geo-targeted traffic to your website, the most efficient way to do it is to have a server located in your own country. If your customer base is in a particular location, choose a server that is located in the same place or as close to the location as possible, to provide minimal latency. For example, if your website is targeted for Canada, you will want to host your website on a Canadian-based server, and so on.

However, if, for some reason, your web hosting provider does not have a data center where your customer base is mainly located, will it have an impact on your website? Yes and no. It is your choice of web hosting provider, the services they offer and the type of hosting you choose that will determine the quality of your page load time.

When you choose your web hosting provider, opt for one that offers CDN (Content Delivery Network). Content Delivery Network is a network of servers located in strategic locations that store cache content. One of the primary features of CDN is that it makes sure that your website loading time remains the same, regardless of your users’ location to that server, therefore lowering the world wide wait. Also, CDN will help speed up your Prestashop website in different countries. However, to remain focused on your target audience, pick a hosting provider only in the country whose traffic you are targeting.

This way, you will make sure that your website will load faster in that country, due to the server’s IP, and search engines bots will determine the location of your server.

Make good use of the SEO tools at your disposal

Many tools are available to help optimize your Prestashop website and e-commerce. Generally, they work by scanning your website’s content. Then, the information gathered is compared against the SEO influencing aspects of your website to give it a score. After, tools will go a step further and will provide strategies to help you improve your ranking on popular search engines.

SEO specialists will also analyse your website’s structure to determine if it is in a form that can be easily understood by search engines. Have SEO experts and writers take a look at your website whether characteristics of your content such as meta-titles and meta-descriptions can be read and seen clearly by all search engines.

Also, with adapted SEO tools, you can submit your website to search engines. Once your website or e-commerce are listed, a process that can take a few weeks, you can use SEO tools to compare how you rank on the different search engines based on relevant and most-searched keywords.

Like security, SEO is something that needs to be worked on and improved constantly. By having a professional web hosting provider working on your website’s hosting solution, you can concentrate on having the right SEO tools to make sure that your content is optimized, relevant and interesting for your users.

Questions?

If you have any questions about our Prestashop hosting solutions, our services, and our prices, please feel free to contact us. Our expert team at Marketing Media will be happy to provide you with all the information you need.