In the rush to grow your business, it’s easy to overlook some of the most important aspects of running a successful operation. One such aspect is creating a positive user experience with fast shared hosting. This post will explore how you can ensure that your customers have an enjoyable and seamless interaction with your site, which will lead to increased sales and referrals for you.
What is fast shared hosting?
Fast shared hosting is a hosting service that enables users to serve their content or application to the internet through web servers to their site visitors with great speed.
If your website is a brochure style website with low traffic, speed might not be at the top of your priority list. Though, if you aspire to have more visitors to your website, or are hosting a high traffic site, how quickly your hosting provider is able to load your website should be a strong consideration. Google has started identifying page loads over three seconds as adversely impacting user experience. This may result in your site being less visible out on the web vs. your competition.
Why you should pay attention to how fast your website loads
Believe it or not, a bad user experience can have a big impact on your sales and how people feel about your company. Realistically, most users expect pages to load within a second or two, and if they don’t see results in that time frame, will likely move on without even reading your page. The vast majority of websites are abandoned within the first few seconds of loading time, so even if you offer a great product or service, if people don’t stay long enough to find out about it, they’ll be unlikely to buy anything from you. Since every millisecond counts when it comes to page load time, it’s worth spending time and energy on making sure your website loads quickly.
Google is watching
Many people are not aware that Google’s page speed tools can have a significant impact on their search engine ranking. This is because Google measures the speed of a site on two fronts: how well it loads in real-time and how quickly it responds to user interactions. With both of these metrics, fast shared hosting can make all the difference in obtaining higher rankings for your website.
Higher rankings in Google can also make an impact on your company’s visibility. This is because the higher the rank, the higher your website will appear in search engine queries. When a potential customer searches for a product or service and your site comes up, this can be the first step towards conversion, but if no one can find you because your website doesn’t return in search results, all of this hard work you’ve done to build your site doesn’t mean much.
5 Factors that can impact your page load speed
Commonly, when people think about site speed they only think about the server’s hardware and performance. This is important but it’s not the only factor that affects how fast your site loads.
1. Coding
It’s best to focus on working with a developer who focuses on lightweight development best practices to optimize their code and design elements. The software that you use to build your site and the kind of coding used to create your site play an important role in determining how fast your page loads. If these aspects are missing the mark, it can have a negative impact on your site’s loading speed.
Bloated sites are slow sites. Always use the simplest code possible to get your job done and avoid over loading your database with unused plugins or javascript libraries. Ending up with a bloated site will have effects on how quickly your site is able to load.
2. Content
The amount of content on your site also plays a role in determining how long it will take for your page to fully load. That’s why you should keep things simple and create a few pages with short articles, pictures, and videos rather than having stacks of unrelated information on each page. A low-quality website will have a negative impact on the user experience and consume unnecessary resources to load information your users probably don’t even care about.
Videos may look cool on your desktop browser, but can present a terrible user experience on mobile devices and consume a ton of resources in the process. Focus instead on presenting a clear and concise message to your users. Otherwise, if in doubt, throw it out.
3. Server performance
The performance of the server is among the biggest factors that can affect how fast your website loads. A fast shared hosting service will ensure that your site’s web host has a lot of bandwidth and computing power to handle heavy traffic or a high volume of simultaneous requests. If you are using a cheap shared hosting provider, it may not offer enough horsepower to support your site and boost its load speed.
Fast shared hosting providers will employ premium hardware in their hosting platform. Solid State Drives (SSDs), the kind of CPUs used and the type of memory used can make a big difference in how fast your site loads. It’s important that your hosting provider of choice employs the latest high performing hardware in their server builds.
4. Database
Large databases can cause your site to load slowly. This is because the hosting server needs more time to process the content, and this is especially true if you have a very active database that receives lots of traffic. To ensure that your site loads fast, make sure to use a clean database structure and avoid having unnecessary tables. This can often happen on CMSs like WordPress and Joomla where users have installed all manner of plugins and extensions to achieve a desired function. So, don’t install something unless it’s absolutely vital to the success of your site.
The type of database you use is also important. Using hosting with the latest stable version of MySQL is a good start. We use something called MariaDB, which boasts increased performance and stability over older versions. MariaDB is a drop in replacement for MySQL, and it’s much faster than its predecessor (MySQL). If you have an old site built on the older version of MySQL, we’d recommend upgrading to a host with MariaDB available to experience the performance benefits.
5. Caching
When a user visits your site they make requests for certain types of files. If you use appropriate caching techniques, this content won’t have to be dynamically generated each time the page loads. Since most webpages don’t change often, caching can be a great way of speeding up your site. We utilize something called LiteSpeed Web Server, which includes a caching plugin to dramatically improve your site’s performance.
You own the experience you create for your customers
The web hosting industry is constantly changing, and it’s important to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in order to make sure your site has a fast load time. In today’s post, we’ve talked about some of the ways you can ensure that visitors have a pleasant experience on your website by making sure they don’t encounter any loading problems or delays. By following these considerations when choosing a fast shared hosting provider, you’ll be well on your way towards delivering an excellent customer experience.
Although there are many things that can affect your site’s speed, it is ultimately up to you to make sure the experience you create for visitors is a positive one. Keep these points in mind when creating, hosting, and maintaining your website. You’ll get more traffic, which may lead to increased sales and more customers.
If you’re looking to get your site hosted on fast web hosting, send us a message. We’d love to discuss how we can help you.