So you have completed your new website and are ready to roll. Rubbing your hands in glee, you can’t wait to reap your harvest. All you need now is a web host to house your site. You may think that any Tom, Dick or Harry will do. After all, you need a place to park the files. In today’s article, we’ll see the importance of hosting for your website performance.
This couldn’t be farther from the truth. The web hosting you choose can affect your website’s performance in many ways, and this is especially crucial when launching a new website on the Internet. You may not know this, but there is a potentially powerful relationship between your hosting company and the ROI of your business.
Why Website Performance Matters
A good website performance translates into more traffic to your website. Every business owner wants a significant amount of traffic coming into their website, which is crucial to any business growth. After all, higher website traffic = higher conversion = higher revenue.
User Satisfaction
Improved web performance increases user satisfaction, thus automatically increases the loyalty of your visitors. If your web page takes longer than two seconds to load, you can expect visitors to more likely give up and move on to other sites.
This is your bounce rate, which is an important measurement for reviewing your website’s effectiveness.
Users generally expect and want a fast and reliable online user experience. You’ll need to reduce your website’s bounce rate to project a strong first impression on your visitors.
Conversion Rates
Better website performance leads to increased conversion rates. When a user buys your service or product, subscribes to your mailing list, and even consumes your content (via the Ads), that in itself is a successful conversion. This means more revenue.
SEO
Google considers load time when ranking websites in the search results. If you rank high, chances are higher you’ll get more visitors. Therefore, if you are serious about your website, you’ll need to ensure your Google ranking is high to improve your SEO and search engine’s credibility.
How the Web Host Affects Site Performance
Depending on the web host and the plan you sign up for, this can greatly impact your website’s performance. So, you’ll need to understand how a web host could impact your website performance to help you decide better.
Speed
Webpage speed is basically a measurement of how fast the content on your page loads. By now, you’d know that web load speed impacts user satisfaction, which affects customer conversions.
It’s all about speed. You need to look into both the hosting provider and package details. This is because the hosting you select can also play a part in determining overall performance.
Shared Hosting
If your website expects light traffic, you can consider Shared Hosting. The shared hosting performance is affected by the number of websites on the server as they share the same resources. Do be aware, though, that if other websites consume more resources, your website’s performance will be affected.
Dedicated Hosting
If your website expects massive traffic, you’ll need to look into getting a dedicated server. All resources are at your website’s sole disposal. This is usually meant for enterprise-level websites or global ecommerce sites.
This option is generally the most expensive to maintain and can cost significant amounts, especially in the long run.
VPS: Importance of Hosting in Website Performance
Virtual Private Server (VPS) is like shared hosting except that you’ll get access to fixed resources in a small segment of a server, and they’re 100% yours. This could be an excellent choice for SME websites or growing ecommerce sites that need greater security and more reliable performance.
Cloud
Cloud Sharing is similar to shared hosting, except that your website will share resources with other websites across multiple servers. This is a great way to ensure better overall performance. In any lagging issues or outages on one server, another server can pick up the slack.
Security
Having your website hacked and losing all data is the biggest nightmare any business owner could fathom. The fact that cybercriminals usually target the web host does not ease your fears.
You need to take stringent steps to monitor and check regularly with your web host.
Your web host must always put into practice the best measures for securing your website. It is important that your web host also offers a strong policy against Distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS). This is to ensure that your website is safe in case of any cyberattacks.
SEO: Importance of Hosting in Website Performance
Ever since Google made page speed a ranking factor, business owners stress the importance of page speed to earn higher SEO rankings. This is of no surprise as higher SEO rankings translate to higher conversions.
Web hosting type greatly impacts the loading speed of the page, hence indirectly determines the SEO rankings.
Uptime
Every business owner insists on a high uptime when it comes to their websites. Website downtime = loss in revenue. Since downtime also impacts your SEO, you must ensure that your website faces no unwanted downtime.
You also wouldn’t want a customer who wants to make a transaction at your website but can’t because of any downtime.
To ensure this, your web host needs to provide a continual uptime guarantee. Most web hosts provide a failover option; if a server goes down, your website doesn’t follow suit as other servers can pick up the slack. This is true except for shared hosting.
Server Location: Importance of Hosting in Website Performance
This could have a profound impact on your website performance. If your business is targeting locals, you’d be expecting traffic from the surrounding region. Therefore the server location needs to match that demographic.
If you have a broader target – say from all over the globe, then server location won’t matter as much. Ideally, though, choose a server location closer to where most of your traffic is expected to come from.
DNS
Many may overlook when choosing a web hosting provider is the Domain Name System (DNS). Like a phone book, it’s essentially a directory that translates domain names into IPs. So, if the DNS is down, your website will follow suit. You’ll need to get a more reliable DNS from your web host.
Importance of Hosting in Website Performance Conclusion
Web hosting is more critical to online businesses than many would give it credit for. As you now know, your choice of web hosting can seriously impact your online business’s lifeline. Downtime, slow loading speeds, compromised security, to name a few, are what will turn off your customers, cut into your bottom line, and ultimately erode your business.
Simply put, website hosting is too important to leave to chance. Therefore, you must choose a hosting provider carefully, one that will ensure you can sleep well at night, knowing that your website is in good hands.
