Introduction:
In the age of digitization, website speed no doubt is becoming more of a necessity than an option. The unfortunate reality of a slow website is that visitors are not the only ones who become annoyed; search engines are also affected, and in the end, the business suffers. In this paper, ComputerLog.com looks at one of the possible factors that determine the success of a business, that is, the speed of a website and how much the choice of a hosting service affects it.
Website Speed: The Silent Killer of Conversions Events
Consider the following example: a visitor opens the page of your site to find out more about your services and products, and is looking forward to it. Instead of the content, it’s only a loading screen that greets the user after several minutes. The lost potential customer grows weary of your web page and parks it in favor of the competitor. Clearly, due to the slow loading times of web pages, this is unfortunately a relatable situation experienced on millions of occasions daily.
The following reasons explain why the website speed is vital for your business:
- Boosted User Experience: Use of fast-loading sites equals good mobility and user friendly. Such visitors are more likely to delve deeper into the site, and interact with its contents, thus converting into potential leads or active buyers.
- Boosted Search Engine Ranking: Google and other similar search engines give preference to sites with quick load times. Searching will prove futile for slow sites since the customers will have to look for other services easier to find.
- Higher Rates of Conversion: Website speed has been proven to affect the conversion rates of a website. Looking at loading times, conversion drops with each increase of one second in additional load time.
- Better Bounce Rate Optimization: Bounce rate is a relative measure of the share of single-page visitors who exit the website instantly, after gauging only a single page of it. Business is lost whenever a website is slow, as there exists an increase in the bounce rate which signifies such losses.
The Hosting Influence on the Speed of Website
The hosting provider selection is significant for the performance of the site. Here are the areas in which the hosting environment affects the speed of the website:
- Hardware of the Server: Having good quality server hardware with enough processing power and RAM is very important to achieve very fast loading times. Shared hosting tends to be a slowdown for the websites in question. Because in shared hosting there are numerous other websites hosted on the same server and when there is a sudden increase in traffic it can quickly reach the capacity of the server making it congested.
- Location of the Server: The distance of the server from the user affects the speed of loading of the site for different users connected to the site in different locations. Opting for a web host whose servers are in proximity to the intended users will drastically decrease the loading times.
- Configuration of the Software: How effectively the server performance is tweaked by the host, will have speed implications too. Caching and CDN of a particular site increases the speed of that particular site for the visitors to the site.
- Safety Precautions: Everyone agrees that there should be Security but very high levels of Security can at times reduce the performance of the website. It is important to get the services of a hosting provider who has reasonable security solutions without compromising website performance.
Enhancing Website Performance: More than Just Hosting
The right host for your website is important but even so, you can improve your website speed through the following optimization tricks:
- Images Speak Louder than Words: Having lots of images on your site can cause your site’s speed to drop. Other than delivery services, consider using tools that can shrink down the picture size but not much on the quality.
- Cut the Code: Make sure that pages of your website contain only the code that is required for proper display. All other elements, which tend to build up unnecessary content have to be removed.
- Make Use of Caching: When a user visits a website and views a specific page, that page and related content are stored for future quick access purposes. This allows the particular visitor to browse through the page and its contents without any delays whatsoever.
- Think of a CDN: This is a geographically distributed network of numerous servers optimized for servicing web hosts and their clients – whenever someone visits a CDNed website the contents are delivered by the closest cache, thereby saving the user from potentially long download waiting times.
When to slow down: Building Speed Comes with a Cost.
On any given day, the speed of a website is a cost-related investment for a company. In doing so, it is the process of incorporating a fast reliable hosting provider, with servers of high performance, and engaging in optimization techniques to make sure that the site has a fast turnaround. This contributes to better returns on user experience rather than frustration because of waiting for pages to load thereby improving the overall search ranking of the business hence more profits.
Call on Computerlog.com to obtain further information about our hosting services. Speak to any of our highly trained consultants to get insights into which hosting plan suits the speed and performance needs of your website.