System Uptime
What is System Uptime?
System Uptime is expressed as a percentage of time that a server is responding to user requests; it’s not necessarily the same percentage as the server being powered on.
The reliability of your website’s server uptime plays a crucial role in enhancing SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for several essential reasons:
Does Server Uptime help with SEO?
Ensuring that your server remains up and running is vital for SEO purposes. While it may not directly affect your website’s rankings, it has an indirect impact on essential SEO factors like user experience, engagement metrics, and crawl budget.
Search engines consider these metrics to determine your website’s value and relevance, which ultimately influences your rankings in search results.
WordPress SEO and Server Uptime
Server Uptime Considerations for SEO
User Experience
Consistent server uptime ensures your website remains accessible to users at all times. Websites that are often down or slow to load can frustrate users, causing them to leave quickly, resulting in a high bounce rate. Search engines consider user behaviour, such as bounce rate and dwell time, when determining rankings. A website with reliable uptime offers a positive user experience, leading to improved engagement metrics and potentially higher search rankings.
Search Engine Crawl
Search engines continuously index websites to evaluate their content and rank them in search results. If your server experiences frequent downtime or extended periods of unavailability, search engine bots will be unable to access and index your site. Consequently, your content might not be included in search results, leading to decreased organic traffic and visibility.
Crawl Budget Waste
Crawl budget refers to the maximum number of pages or resources that search engine bots, commonly known as spiders or crawlers, are allowed to explore on a particular website within a specific time frame. This concept plays a significant role in search engine optimisation (SEO) as it directly impacts a website’s indexing and ranking in search results.
Search engine crawlers have finite resources and time, which limits the number of pages they can crawl during a single visit to a site. The crawl budget is a crucial factor as it determines the maximum number of pages that a search engine will crawl from a website within a given period.
Several factors influence the crawl budget, including the overall authority of the website, the quality of its content, server performance, and the frequency of updates. Websites with a higher crawl budget have better chances of having their new and updated content indexed quickly, ultimately improving their search engine rankings.
Websites with higher uptime and consistent availability receive more frequent crawls, ensuring that new content and updates are indexed promptly. In contrast, websites with poor uptime may experience crawl budget waste, where search engines miss essential content due to server issues.
Indexing Speed
Indexing speed, in the realm of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), refers to the speed with which search engines can locate, process, and incorporate new or updated web pages from a website into their database, also known as the index. The index serves as a repository of information collected by search engines while traversing the web, enabling them to furnish relevant search results to users.
The swiftness of indexing holds significant importance for SEO, as it directly influences how rapidly fresh content or modifications to existing content are reflected in search results. Websites with a higher indexing speed see their latest content in search results sooner, potentially leading to heightened visibility and increased traffic.
Quick indexing of new or updated content is essential for staying relevant in search results. Websites with high uptime benefit from faster indexing since search engine bots can access and process their content promptly. This means that your new blog posts, product pages, or any other updates will be visible to users and search engines much faster, potentially leading to quicker improvements in search rankings.
Best Uptime For SEO?
While server uptime is not a direct ranking factor, it indirectly influences other SEO factors that impact rankings. User experience, engagement metrics, and crawl budget are all influenced by server uptime and these factors play a significant role in determining how search engines perceive the value and relevance of your website’s content, ultimately affecting your rankings.
Higher uptime percentages are better, but as the uptime (or downtime) is an indicator of the quality of the hosting, higher uptimes are going to be more expensive.
The best uptime for SEO is considered to be 100%, meaning the website is consistently available without any downtime or disruptions. However, achieving perfect uptime is challenging in practice due to various factors, such as server issues, maintenance, and unforeseen technical problems, which can lead to occasional periods of downtime.
While aiming for 100% uptime is ideal, search engines understand that brief downtimes can occur even to the most reliable websites. They typically allow for some tolerance concerning short periods of downtime when assessing a website’s performance and rankings.
Our recommendation is to aim for at least 3 nines uptime, 99.9% availability which equates to 1.44 minutes of downtime per day on average, or nearly 9 hours a year.
Server Uptime Availability in Hours
| Availability % | Downtime per year | Downtime per day (24 hours) |
|---|---|---|
| 90% ("one nine") | 36.53 days | 2.40 hours |
| 95% ("one nine five") | 18.26 days | 1.20 hours |
| 97% ("one nine seven") | 10.96 days | 43.20 minutes |
| 98% ("one nine eight") | 7.31 days | 28.80 minutes |
| 99% ("two nines") | 3.65 days | 14.40 minutes |
| 99.5% ("two nines five") | 1.83 days | 7.20 minutes |
| 99.8% ("two nines eight") | 17.53 hours | 2.88 minutes |
| 99.9% ("three nines") | 8.77 hours | 1.44 minutes |
| 99.95% ("three nines five") | 4.38 hours | 43.20 seconds |
| 99.99% ("four nines") | 52.60 minutes | 8.64 seconds |
| 99.995% ("four nines five") | 26.30 minutes | 4.32 seconds |
| 99.999% ("five nines") | 5.26 minutes | 864.00 milliseconds |
| 99.9999% ("six nines") | 31.56 seconds | 86.40 milliseconds |
| 99.99999% ("seven nines") | 3.16 seconds | 8.64 milliseconds |
| 99.999999% ("eight nines") | 315.58 milliseconds | 864.00 microseconds |
| 99.9999999% ("nine nines") | 31.56 milliseconds | 86.40 microseconds |