Is Your Web Hosting Effecting Your Business?

Web hosting is often over looked when businesses set up a website. It's almost overlooked to concentrate on the actual website. Choosing your hosting provider should be selected carefully and think about the type of website you are hosting. If it's an e-commerce website your going to need a lot of resources if is to run smoothly. Especially if your traffic spikes during peak times.

There are a number of reasons why your hosting could be blocking your customers from coming through the door. I have put together a list of the main reasons why your business could be effected by your hosting.

#1 Every Second Counts - Slow Page Speeds

Have you ever been waiting for a page to load and just given up before you've had chance to see it? Is the answer yes? You're not the only one. Some larger hosting providers host your website on the same server as thousands of others in order to make a larger profit from that machine. During peak times your website can run extremely slow.

Having slow page speeds are a huge factor in whether or not a customer will choose to purchase your product or go with your service. If they cant get onto your website, you've lost a potential lead and you've also lost money.

Research says that a 1 second delay in a page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

Google states that any website slower than 200ms is deemed as slow. If you appease the Google gods, you’ll also do better in the search results too!

So how do you if it's your web server being slow? You can run it through one of Google's tools called Page Speed Insights and run your website through this test. It will give you a score out of a 100 on both mobile and desktop.

#2 Security & Safety

Security and safety is one of the most important aspect to think about when choosing a hosting provider. If your business is based online you really need to consider the risks of your website being compromised. This could mean you would need to rebuild an entire website from scratch if anything happens, which is going to potentially set you back thousands.

Back ups

Ensure that your web hosting is backing up your website every night. If anything was to compromise the website you can restore from the last back up.

SSL Certificates

It’s important to have a secure server with an SSL certificate of some kind. You’ll be able to order a certificate with your hosting provider. This will encrypt all data on your database. You will also see the ‘secure’ bad appearing in the address bar. Thus giving your customers the confidence to enquiry, or buy with you.