Page loading speed continues to be a hot topic in the UX and SEO.Even today, there are still incorrect or incomplete instructions on page speed.You can optimize your site and cache everything you need.However, if your web host sucks, it has nothing to do with your web design.
In my opinion, you rely entirely on a third party for your website performance.Hosting affects site speed!
The page load speed matters a lot!
Many website owners looking for cheap hosting solutions. When it comes to site speed, web hosting is one of the most ignored factors. Web hosting is a key factor in website speed.Why does site speed matter?There are two reasons why website speed is important.
1. SEO
Your site’s page load speed may have an impact on your Google rankings because it is part of Google’s ranking algorithm.
According to a recent announcement by Google, page loading speed is used to rank pages for desktop searches as well as mobile searches.Depending on the industry, Google is using 2 seconds as their cut off mark for “Top Performing” sites on mobile devices.
2. UX
If your site takes 30 seconds to load, how will users respond?
That’s much worse than its impact on Google rankings. Multiple studies have consistently revealed the impact of site speed on user experience.Slow loading times cause user abandonmentsand decrease conversion rates.
In a recent loading time study revealed that around 40% of visitors will abandon your site entirely if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.What does it mean? It means if your site gets 10,000 visits every month, you are losing 4,000 of them each month. It’s nearly half of your potential customers.
Another research also found that a one-second delay can result in a 7 percent loss of conversion.For an online store that makes $50,000 a day, that one-second delay can result in the loss of more than one million each year.
The point is that no one waits for a few minutes until your site loads.
Why web hosting is a vital factor
What is web hosting? In its simplest terms, it is the physical location of your website. It’s a remote computer that contains all informationlike databases, images, videos, files of your website. We call this remote computer as a web server.
There are three main tasks that the remote webserver has to finish when a user browses a website and attempts to load a web page.
Execute code:
The web server has run and executes thousands of lines of codeto render a single webpage. It’s like opening a program on your computer. For an instance, the PHP that WordPress is written using.
Run database queries:
A database is a structured collection of data. CMS-based websites use databases to store data, making it easily retrievable when needed. When a web browser renders a web page, the website code has to execute database queries to retrieve web page content from the database.
Serve files:
Loading a typical webpage involves serving up dozens of files from the webserver. For example, over 350 requests to load the home page of Amazon should be sent to the webserver.
The faster the remote server, the faster the user will get the requested web pages. Such a process is executed in milliseconds. Can you imagine that? It’s mind-blowing.
Faster web hosting enhances page loading speed
If you are using shared web hosting, upgrading your hosting plan can have a significant positive impact on the page load speed. Shared hosting is a type of web hosting that hosts multiple sites on one physical server. So, shared web hosting usually comes with very limited resources.
How to choose an ideal web hosting package
If your site is loading slowly because several users are browsing the site at the same time, upgrading your current hosting package to VPS or cloud hosting can cause a significant increase in speed.
But, how to choose a reliable web hosting/WordPress services provider? Below are some of the vital hosting factors that make your website load faster.
Dedicated resources:
First, you need to choose a hosting plan that provides dedicated resources (e.g. processor, memory and storage).Instead of choosing a shared hosting plan, choose a VPS, Cloud or a dedicated server.
Below is an example cloud hosting plan (from Cloudways).
There are dedicated resources (processor, memory, and storage). In my opinion, Cloudways is one of the best cloud hosting providers and they have a great reputation in the industry. Also, here you can find a coupon code which offers $30 free hosting credits to try them.
Solid State Drive (SSD)
An SSD drive loads files faster than a standard mechanical hard drive, resulting in faster performance. Below is an example for an SSD drive (from Greengeeks).
They offer SSD based web hosting that is much faster than regular web hosting. If you need more resources, just upgrade your plan to a higher level.
Enhanced Resources
This is another important factor that showed in various web hosting plans.Keeping your resources directly on the webserver can increase performance rather than putting them on another server with shared clients.
How much can faster web hosting improve site performance?
If you have a resource-intensive website, upgrading the current web hosting plan to VPS or cloud hosting can have a significant impact on site performance. According to a study by SEJ on page load speeds, upgrading from a basic shared hosting plan to a VPS hosting plan has a dramatic impact.
SEJ’s Magento test site has a 62% improvement in page load speed with VPS hosting plan.
Is VPS hosting out of your budget? No worries. Cloud hosting offers a price closer to a shared server and brings the benefits of a VPS server.
In the end, all that matter is the speed of your site. Since website speed and web hosting are highly correlated, upgrading to a better web hosting plan is no doubt guaranteed to result in better results and increased ROI.
