Your brand’s website acts as its digital identity and its performance can greatly affect your business. A poorly performing website not only increases bounce rates but can also lead to negative brand perception.
Recent statistics show that 40% of online users leave a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load and 88% are less likely to return to a website after a bad user experience.
If your website also has performance issues, the main culprit behind that could be your web hosting service. In this article, we’ll discuss how web hosting affects your website performance to help you understand what to look for while choosing a web hosting service.
What is Web Hosting?
Web hosting is an online service that you can use to store your website to make it accessible on the internet. In simple words, a service that lets you utilize a powerful computer to store your website’s files, and provides its content to visitors when needed is called web hosting.
There are different types of web hosting available in the market, such as:
- Shared Hosting
- Cloud Hosting
- VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting
- Dedicated Hosting
- WordPress Hosting
- Reseller Hosting
These hosting types are designed to meet different levels of traffic and business needs. If you’re exploring different web hosting services for your website, you can read the linked Cybernews guide to find the best option.
Ways Web Hosting Affects Website Performance
The quality of the web hosting service is critical when it comes to your website performance. While high-quality hosting can’t make a poorly developed website load fast, the opposite is true. It means that low-quality hosting can make a well-developed website load slowly.
However, it’s important to note that your website performance isn’t just about speed. It includes many other factors that you should take into account while selecting a website hosting service.
Speed
Although we’ve already talked about the importance of website speed for your business, we haven’t really discussed the role of web hosting in affecting it. The primary way web hosting affects your website’s loading time is through its server performance.
For example, if you use a cheap shared hosting plan, your website will have to share server resources, such as RAM, CPU cores, and storage, with multiple other websites. It can slow down your site, specifically during peak traffic hours.
Whereas, you’ll have more server resources for your website with cloud or dedicated hosting, which will improve performance.
Important Note: Your website’s loading speed can also affect its search engine ranking. That’s because search engines prioritize fast-loading websites, as they offer a better user experience.
Security
You would already know that it’s essential to improve your website’s security posture to keep it safe from cyber threats. But did you know that the security can directly affect your site’s performance?
A successful cyberattack like DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) can slow down or even crash your website. It can lead to downtimes, causing loss of visitors and potential customers.
While most modern web hosting services offer essential security features like firewalls and malware protection, there are still options available that don’t take security seriously.
Opting for such a hosting service can make your website vulnerable to cyberattacks and put its data and performance at risk. In addition, a single security breach on your website can also result in search ranking penalties.
Uptime
The web hosting provider you choose has a direct impact on how often your website goes down. If the provider’s server is down, your website will not work, and it can cost you visitors and sales. In addition, it’ll also leave a negative impact on user trust.
Keep in mind that frequent downtime can also decrease your website’s search engine rankings. If your website is down and search engine crawlers attempt to index it, they’ll most probably encounter errors. It’ll signal search engines that your website is not reliable, which can lead to lower visibility in search results.
Server Location
For better website performance, the physical location of your web hosting server should be close to your target audience. If it’s too far away, the data will need to travel a longer distance, resulting in slower loading times.
Considering the server location is especially important for businesses targeting people in specific regions or countries. A server located closer to your audience can significantly improve load times and the overall user experience.
Quick Note: The location of your web hosting server can impact local SEO by indicating to search engines that your website is more relevant to users in a specific region.
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A CDN is a network of web hosting servers that are located in different areas of the world. Its primary purpose is to make sure that your website content is delivered to your visitors quickly.
Using a CDN comes in handy when your brand targets international audiences. That’s because it creates multiple copies of your website and stores them on different servers located close to your visitors. So, whenever a user visits your website, the CDN provides them with the requested content using the server closest to them.
For example, if someone from Australia visits your website but it’s hosted in the US, the content will have to travel a long distance and it’ll slow things down. But if you’re using a CDN, a copy of your website will be stored on a server in Australia, which will allow your Australian audience to load the content much faster.
Therefore, it’s important to select a web hosting service that offers the CDN feature, especially if your target audiences are from multiple countries.
Scalability
If your web hosting can’t scale with your business, sooner or later your website will face performance issues. As your business grows, your website traffic increases and you’ll need more server resources to handle it.
But if the hosting company you’re using can’t provide the upgrade options, your website will become slow. Worse yet, it can even become unresponsive or crash during peak traffic hours. Such situations can be extremely damaging for your business, as they’ll increase bounce rate and affect customer trust.
Factors to Consider While Choosing a Web Hosting Provider
While exploring web hosting providers, you should consider all the ways we have discussed so far that can affect your website performance. Other than that, you should also take into account the following:
Pricing
When it comes to the pricing of a service or product, we always recommend our readers prioritize value for money instead of absolute cost. The same goes for a web hosting service. Start by comparing different options and their pricing, but also consider what features come with that price.
Customer Support
Reliable customer support is not something nice to have. It’s essential, especially in the case of web hosting because there’s always a chance of coming across some technical server issue that’s slowing down your website.
If a web hosting provider offers 24/7 customer service, you’ll be able to get all your issues resolved as soon as possible. So, make sure that the hosting provider you choose guarantees round-the-clock support service to avoid unwanted scenarios.
Conclusion
Even if you have a well-developed and highly optimized website, it’ll fail to reach its full potential without reliable web hosting. Therefore, it’s highly recommended not to skimp on choosing a hosting provider.
Take all the time you need to make sure that the provider you choose offers everything your website needs to perform at its best.
