Is it better to have hosting that specializes in performance or have the host closer to you physically?

[JillB2013]

I am looking to change to a new hosting company.

I am debating between taking a company that specializes in Wordpress and performance but is situated far from my users or a local company that might not be as good from a performance/speed point of view.

Which do you think I should go with?

My users are near Europe and the Wordpress hosting that I am considering is in the US.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Jill,

I'll always take speed and having a server  in another country over having a server local and not having any speed advantages. Mostly, but this is just my take on this, because the factor on how a local server improves your ranking is so small you probably will never see a result on this in your rankings or your organic search traffic. This probably will be the case if you improve for speed, it will decrease the load time for your users hopefully and also decrease the time it takes for Google to download your pages.

Besides this, there are other functionalities to make sure Google is right about the country your site is targeting. Think about: href lang tags, more local signals as in links or company profiles and ofcourse geotargeting within Google Webmaster Tools.

Would absolutely love to hear the arguments for somebody disagreeing on this!

[generalzod]

Improving your speed will help more from an SEO perspective as Google likes to count it towards the 'visitor experience'. Country specific really makes little difference these days, especially as many businesses use content caching such as Cloudflare - which could be based anywhere.