DNS, the acronym for Domain Name System, is a naming database, each separate for a particular domain. This system is designed to translate domain names into IP addresses, enabling devices to communicate over a network.
Inside DNS servers, they hold certain records referred to as DNS records. These records enable devices to connect and locate each other over the internet by mapping data. Misconfigurations in DNS records can have serious consequences and impact a website’s performance and SEO.
In this blog post, you will learn how DNS misconfiguration can impact your website’s performance. Additionally, you will also learn how to correct these misconfigurations to ensure your website continues to perform well.
3 Ways DNS Misconfigurations Hurt Your SEO and Website Performance
The following are three common ways DNS misconfigurations can hurt your SEO and website performance, ultimately impacting your revenue. Go through them carefully to let your website perform well.
1. Increased Page Load Times
Misconfigurations in DNS records lead to slow DNS resolution. For example, if you mistakenly add a number at the end of TTL records, such as for an A or AAAA record, things can go very wrong. This will slow down the resolution process of your DNS records.
This delay in DNS resolution results in increased page load times, which can significantly impact users visiting your website, potentially leading to traffic loss. WebFx mentioned in one of their articles that users expect a website to load in just three seconds. As time increases, they will start abandoning your website. Search engines do not consider this a good signal, which ultimately results in your website being deranked.
So, what’s the solution to it?
Well, if you are facing the slow website speed issue and the website is optimized well, and you think that the problem is at the DNS level, do the following:
- Perform the DNS Lookup for the website. Many online tools, such as DNSChecker.org or Whatsmydns.net, offer a free DNS lookup tool that lets you do that easily.
- Carefully review the TTL values for the records. They are not the culprit, but in the majority of cases, they are when it comes to speed.
- If you find a record with an excessively high TTL value, go to your domain dashboard and correct it.
- After making corrections, wait for the new records to propagate (how much time it will take will depend on the previously propagated TTL values).
2. Lead to Downtime and Crawl Errors
Misconfigurations in A or AAAA records can direct traffic to an incorrect IP address. It can take your website down from the internet and make it inaccessible to users worldwide.
The browser might display a “Site can’t be reached” error to users, while Googlebot receives DNS resolution errors and marks your pages as unreachable.
Long website downtimes have a direct impact on a website’s SEO. In one of their articles, Statuscake directly correlated website downtime with lost rankings on search engines.
If your website is experiencing downtime, immediately check its A or AAAA record. You can do this by checking DNS records either by using an online tool or by logging in to the domain’s dashboard.
3. Break CDN and Subdomain Functionality
Misconfiguration in certain DNS records, such as CNAME, disrupts critical services, including CDN integration and subdomain functionality. This misconfiguration can prevent subdomains from being resolved by CDNs. Images, CSS, and fonts will also fail to load correctly.
In some cases, webpages also failed to load or appeared broken, especially on mobile devices. As 65% of the website traffic comes from mobile devices, this misconfiguration causes trouble. This further results in poor SEO performance, which ultimately leads to a drop in rankings. It also causes trouble in the indexing of new pages, as the bot will encounter a DNS error when it comes for the crawl.
To fix the issue, try testing how CNAME records are resolving. For this, you can use the tools we mentioned earlier. Additionally, consider verifying the integration documents from your CDN or platform provider. Additionally, you should also verify HTTPS provisioning if using a CDN-managed TLS.
Final Thoughts
The above article explained the three common ways DNS misconfigurations are hurting the SEO and performance of a website. However, these are not the least of them. Many, many other problems can occur due to a minor misconfiguration in DNS.
Many online tools, like those mentioned in the article above, let you identify where the misconfiguration is and what is causing the trouble. If you ever doubt that the DNS records of your website are causing trouble, consider performing a DNS lookup immediately to identify the issue and mitigate it promptly.