I get a lot of questions about web hosting for doctors.
- Which hosting company is the best?
- How does where I host my website affect SEO?
- Why can’t I just use one of the cheap hosting solutions?
These are all great questions, and probably the most important one being how does it affect SEO?
There are a few ways that web hosting can affect SEO, but perhaps the biggest factors are page speed and uptime.
Page speed. How quickly a page loads on a patient’s device is an SEO ranking factor by Google. This was made even more clear following their Core Web Vitals update. If you go with a cheap hosting option, you’re typically going to be in a shared hosting environment, and the allotted bandwidth to your site is going to be limited.
Uptime/reliability. Most hosting providers will cite 99.9% uptime. While that’s a good and important metric, I learned the hard way that their uptime doesn’t necessarily mean you’re uptime. If your site goes down for a couple of days, not only do you miss out on potential patient revenue, it could cost you in SEO rankings as well.
Web Hosting for Doctors: Which Company Is the Best?
In my company, we only use and recommend WP Engine.
For years we utilized Bluehost, but after a significant reliability problem that put us in a bad spot and left us scrambling, my Chief Technology Officer said, “We need to make a move, now.”
We’ve now been with WP Engine for several years, and have been more than pleased. Also, from my personal experience, and I’ve used almost every major web host at one time, the customer support at WP Engine is by far the best in the industry. And honestly, it’s not even close.
I’ve written before on several reasons they provide the best web hosting for doctors, which you can read here.
Bottom line, because web hosting impacts your SEO and is an important foundation of your platform, you want to make sure you go with a hosting provider that is solid. Web hosting for doctors is not an area to skimp on.