Why Your Hosting Service Has A Huge Impact On Your Sales

If you are looking for the best hosting service for WordPress or you think that you may need to make a change from the hosting that you are currently using, you may be wondering how your hosting has an impact on sales as well as engagement and profitability.

Even if you have the best website that money can buy, if you do not have a host that meets your particular needs, you may find that it can greatly impact your bottom line.

So how can your hosting service negatively affect your sales? Let’s take a look at some of the biggest factors.

Site Speed

One of the important things to pay attention to is page load times. While a 10 second load time doesn’t sound like a lot, long load times can cause high bounce rates, and ultimately a decrease in sales. This is especially true when it comes to mobile viewing. In fact, if your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, you are losing visitors. If you are losing visitors that means you are losing potential clients. Long load times can also have a negative impact on search engine results, meaning that your site will rank lower in SERPs.

If you are on shared hosting, you are sharing hosting with possibly hundreds of people. That means that you are going to experience slowed speeds on your site. You can research what other people are saying about the host you are considering. Make sure to look at the site speed reviews to see how people say the company is performing.

Site Uptime

This is easy to understand. If your site isn’t up, it’s down. For every minute that your site is offline, you are losing out on potential sales leads. There are many reasons that your site might lose its hosting such as the network devices failing, lack of supervision by system admins, power outages, poorly implemented configuration changes or even DDoS attacks.

You should know that you are never going to find a provider that has 100% uptime, you should make sure that provider that you choose works their hardest to get as close as possible to 100% as they can.

Support

If your do not have a provider that offers good customer support, you could be left sitting for days waiting for a solution. There is no reason to deal with that since there are plenty of hosting providers that give you quick live chat support to help you through any issues that you might be having.

While the challenge that you might be experiencing could be something simple and easy to fix, you won’t know it until you can get some support, since that is not likely your area of expertise.

Security

While we don’t like to think about the fact that some people are constantly out looking for someone to take advantage of, there are some people like that. Because of people like this, you need to make sure that your host has serious security protocols in place. If your site is hacked and someone gets into it without your knowledge, that can mean serious problems.

The Ability to Upgrade

When your business starts to grow and your traffic starts to increase, you are going to need a bigger hosting package. Make sure that the provider that you are considering has plenty of options for you to be able to upgrade when you need to go to the next level. Almost any good hosting provider is going to allow you to do this so if you find someone that doesn’t offer this, you might want to look elsewhere.

What You Can Do to Keep Your Site Running

Having top of the line hosting is important and will allow you to have one of the components of a well functioning website together. Besides for this, you also need to make sure that your WordPress version is up to date. If you don’t update your WordPress version, your site may not work properly when you are trying to use it. Make sure that you check your site after an upgrade since if the plugins you are using are not updated as well, there could be some challenges.

Another thing you should do to keep your site safe is to do regular backups. Even if you hosting company does the backups for you, you want to have your own backups to ensure that you are covered from multiple angles so if anything happens to one set of files, you’ll have the other.

Conclusion

Being a responsible website owner doesn’t have to take a long time. Set up reminders on Google Calendar or some other similar app  so that you can remember to do important site maintenance and backups, as well as and running periodic website speed tests to see if your page speed is up to par are important.

If you keep up with these tasks and make sure that your site is functioning properly, you are going to save yourself a lot of time and energy, as you are less likely to have to deal with site outages and other problems.

Now that you understand more about your hosting, its importance and how to be a responsible website owner, you can get started checking your site for its speed and making sure that your host provides a good amount of uptime.