Best Web Hosting to Increase Website Speed

In an online world, speed rules.  Things have become excessively available and the market is crowded. A single second can prevent you from making a sale. So, it’s important to remember that every single second counts online. A slow website can cause customers to lose interest in your business, go back to the search results, and simply go your competitor’s website instead.  A little less than 50% of website visitors will not wait more than 2-3 seconds for a site to load. Based on the expected speedy response time, if the page doesn’t load with those first few seconds, persons assume it’s offline or not really worth visiting. You do not want that, so you need to ensure your website is fast and loads quickly. In this article, we’ll look at the benefits of having a fast website and the type of hosting that will increase your site speed.

The faster your website the better its performance in terms of visitors, customers, SEO ranking and revenue. That said, it goes without saying, that one of the top characteristics of a great webhosting plan is superb speed. So, let’s explore the advantages of having a fast website.

Benefits of A Fast Website?

The fastest sites, win-all the time!

Regardless of the industry or niche, it’s the desire of every business to have a website that delivers great user experience. A fast website attracts and retains new and/or returning customers and is more likely to perform better than their slower competitors do.

While having a website that moves at the speed of light boosts your SEO ranking, a slow one will result in usability and SEO issues. That is because with so many available options customers will not wait around, they simply move on.  

With a fast website, you will benefit from:

1. Great first impression from visitors who are likely to return.
2. Excellent user-experience.
3. Speed helps customers in deciding whether to make a purchase. The faster the speed the more trustworthy you will seem to customers resulting in them doing business with you.
4. Fast website times directly enhances a site’s performance and reputation, which are ingredients for a successful website.
5. Increase website speed to boost conversion rate, drive traffic and strengthen customer retention.
6. Increased page speed also improves your SEO ranking.  It will also increase the number of your pages, which Google can and will crawl and index. The more pages you have indexed, the higher the possibility of popping up on the first page in search engines. 

How Does Web hosting affect your site’s speed?

It’s not just the web hosting plan that impacts your speed but the web hosting provider as well.  After you have a fast and reliable webhosting company, you have to decide on the hosting plan that will enhance your website speed.

Choosing a reliable hosting provider with powerful web servers positively impacts your website’s load speeds.

Several factors about a hosting plan influence the speed of your site. These include RAM and bandwidth usage. Unfortunately, not all plans are created equally. So, if you have a shared hosting plan, those resources will be split with other websites on that server.  If a neighbouring website gets a spike in traffic, your website and others sharing the server will slow down. To prevent this, you can upgrade to a Virtual Private Server (VPS). 

VPS Hosting Definition

Even though a VPS also uses one server, it is divided into multiple virtual machines with each acting as independent dedicated server. VPS users all have full access to designated resources, meaning you will not have to share anything.  As a result, your website becomes more responsive and pages load extremely faster. With VPS, you gain the benefits of a high-performing plan without paying for your own personal server, like you would with dedicated server hosting which is expensive.  VPS is the perfect middle ground when compared to shared hosting and dedicated server hosting.

Virtual Private Servers are fast primarily because they isolate each user’s resources and performs similar to dedicate server hosting – without the extra costs.

VPS, Virtual Private Server is a simple solution that can increase your website speed.  Hosting.co.uk offers some of the best VPS hosting plans that will cause your website to run significantly faster.  As mentioned several times before, faster page loading times convert site visitors into paying customers.

Pros of VPS

• You are able to purchase just the resources that you need.
• It provides more security than shared hosting.
• You have access to more resources than with shared hosting plan. This increase in resources improves your site speed.
• You have the ability to control and customise your server to meet your specific needs.
• It is scalable.

Cons of VPS

• VPS is more expensive when compared to shared hosting.
• An Unmanaged VPS plan require technical expertise. 

Here are five factors that impact the speed of your website.

1. Using a Reputable Web hosting provider

A part of the speed your website benefits from is linked to that of the web hosting service provider you use. Not all web hosting platforms operate at the same level. Choose a web service company that offers high speed, transparency and scalability.

2. Compress Images

Larger images take longer to load.  This delay can cause your page to go into time-out even causing certain parts of your site to go offline. Compressing your images will reduce the size not the quality.  It will also take up less memory and will improve site speed.

3. Minify JavaScript, CSS and HTML

By removing spaces, commas, and other unnecessary characters you can increase your page speed significantly. Additionally, you can remove code comments, formatting, and unused code to enhance load time. Read more here.

4. Reduce redirects

Try to reduce redirects on your site. That’s because each time a page redirects to another page, site visitors experience additional time waiting for the HTTP request-response cycle to complete.

5. Use a Content Distribution Network

Content Distribution Networks (CDNs), also are networks of servers that can be used to distribute the load of delivering content. This is possible as several copies of your website are stored in multiple, geographically diverse data centres. This creates an easier, faster and more reliable way for visitors around the world to access to your site.

For more about CDN technology, see this article on our blog.

Conclusion

A fast website will help potential customers interact with your company’s site while helping you grow your visibility in the search engines. VPS, Virtual Private Server hosting is one of the best web hosting plans that will help increase your website speed. We offer managed and unmanaged VPS plans that will suit all your hosting desires. At Hosting.co.uk, it’s super easy to upgrade your shared hosting to VPS and VPS to dedicated server hosting.

Also, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool if you want to check your website speed score on desktop and mobile devices.