Budget hosting offers limited bandwidth and CPU, which slows down sites and leads to lower search rankings and organic traffic, the most essential SEO performance metric. Slow pages can harm rankings for target keywords, which are related to traffic value or how much a website would pay for organic clicks if they came from PPC search ads.
When you hear budget hosting, the first concept that springs to mind is shared hosting, where multiple websites share a single server’s resources. It’s affordable and easy to set up, making it ideal for beginners. However, limited resources are part and parcel of budget hosting, and high traffic to one site on the server can slow down the others, affecting user experience and SEO rankings. As of 2024, websites that take more than four seconds to load experience an average conversion rate drop of 4.42% for each subsequent second of delay. A delay of only 100 milliseconds can lead to an increase of 7% in bounce rates. The tendency is even more pronounced for mobile users, 53% of whom leave a website that takes more than three seconds to load.
The most important SEO metric: Organic traffic
Organic traffic refers to all non-paid clicks generated through search engines. An upward trend of this metric reflects SEO success. Google Search Console’s Performance tab provides the most accurate view of organic traffic. Websites that use Google Search Console correctly see a 28% increase in organic traffic.
Limited bandwidth and CPU slow down sites, lowering search rankings
The limitations of cheap web hosting affect many factors that search engines consider when ranking websites. Budget hosts allocate limited resources like bandwidth, CPU, and RAM among multiple websites on the same server. If other sites on the server consume excessive resources, this slows down your site. Search engines like Google prioritize fast-loading websites, as page speed is a ranking factor. Slow load times can lead to lower search rankings, reducing visibility and organic traffic. This is worth keeping in mind as Google led the desktop search market with about 82% as of July 2023, followed by Bing with just 10.51%.
With shared hosting, there’s a higher risk of server downtime because server stability depends on the activities of all hosted websites. Frequent downtime means your site may not be accessible to users and search engine crawlers, leading to poor user experience and lower rankings.
If one site on the server is compromised, others might be at risk, too. When a site on a shared server is flagged as unsafe or hacked, it can be penalized in search rankings and lose credibility with users, directly reducing organic traffic.
Shared hosting plans have a finite capacity to handle traffic spikes. The inability to handle increased traffic can lead to higher bounce rates, which negatively affect search rankings and deter future organic visits.
How affordable hosting can affect keyword rankings
Generally speaking, the more relevant a keyword is to one’s business or product, the more helpful it is for that platform to rank well for it. Tracking keyword rankings lets websites monitor their SEO results for their essential keywords over time.
Slow-loading pages can lead to lower rankings for target keywords, as they negatively impact user experience and engagement metrics like bounce rate.
Traffic value is related to keywords. This is the amount you’d pay for organic clicks if they came from pay-per-click search ads. The more traffic value a website has, the more valuable its organic traffic becomes.
One cannot dispute that clicks from visitors who are likely to convert are the most valuable. While you’ll never see a search ad for a phrase like “What is SEO,” you might see one for “Best SEO agency Chicago.”
Final thoughts
According to BrightEdge, SEO attracts more than 1,000% more traffic than organic social media, and almost 93% of web traffic worldwide comes from Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Images. In the context of strained shared hosting resources, slow server responses can delay or prevent Google bots from crawling your site efficiently. Poor crawlability may thus result in incomplete indexing of your site’s pages, affecting how well your content ranks for relevant keywords.
