Website page loading speed could just be the single most important metric to keep an eye on if you’re running your own website. Here’s a shocking fact—more than half of your visitors will jump ship if your web page doesn’t load within 3 seconds!
That might seem lightning fast, but it’s the norm in today’s digital world. If your site takes longer than a few seconds to load up, you’re going to be losing visitors, and when a visitor hops off your site, there's no chance of making a sale with them… Maybe ever.
But did you know how your website hosting affects your website’s speed? There are steps you can take to boost your site speed, but ultimately, if you’re building a site on a web host that’s working against you… It’s going to be a struggle. Here’s what you should know.
Understanding Website Hosting
A web host is your website’s landlord. You rent digital space for your site to live, and in turn, your web host provides resources to help your website run as smoothly as possible. The first and most important thing to know about website hosting is that it comes in 4 different types, and the one you choose is the foundation of your website’s speed.
- ● Shared: The most affordable but offers the fewest resources, which means your speed is more likely to be slow or, at the very least, unpredictable.
- ● Dedicated: More pricey, but your site has decent resources to use. It’s a good choice if increasing your site speed is on your to-do list.
- ● VPS: A combination of the two above types. More resources than shared hosting, but fewer than dedicated hosting.
- ● Cloud: The ideal choice. Easily-extendable resources, and you only pay for what you actually use, meaning your site always has what it needs to load as fast as possible.
Shared Hosting vs. Other Hosting Types
It’s often tempting to choose shared hosting because a) it’s the most common type of hosting available, and b) it’s generally quite a bit more affordable than others.
But in this case, the tradeoff comes at a cost… And it’s usually one that’ll end up affecting your business down the line.
Shared hosting might be affordable, but there’s a reason for that. Your site will be placed on a server that already houses 100+ other websites! And that means that the resources on the server get split between those 100 or more websites, leaving you with a very small slice of the pie.
However, resource allocation is also dynamic on shared servers. So if your neighboring website suddenly gets a whole lot of traffic, it’ll pull resources away from other sites to give to them for that period of time.
And that means… Your site speed could tank at any time, unexpectedly, and without any way to predict when it might happen. With this in mind, we highly recommend choosing any other type of hosting if website speed is a concern.
Factors Influencing Website Speed
Aside from server resources, there are plenty of other factors that go into your website’s speed. Here are a few of particular importance that are important to know.
Bandwidth
Your host’s bandwidth dictates how much data it can transfer between the server and your user’s computer. It’s often measured in megabits per second (Mbps), and the higher the number is, the faster your site will load on its side.
25 Mbps is a pretty average number. 100 Mbps or more is ideal for keeping your site loading as quickly as possible.
You might also find bandwidth displayed as a monthly overall total of data that can be transferred, like 100GB. Again, the higher the number, the faster you can expect your site to load. Some hosts, like A2 Hosting, offer unlimited bandwidth.
Server Location
Your website’s data has to travel from the server to the visitor’s computer every time someone pops onto your website. If the server is far away from their computer, the data can take longer to reach them, leading to slow loading times.
For this reason, it’s best to choose a web host with a server in or very close to the country that most of your target market lives in. For example, if your target audience is American, choose a host with a server in the USA. If your audience is worldwide, then you might want to consider using a…
Content Delivery Network
A content delivery network, or CDN, makes your content accessible worldwide by caching copies of your website’s data on servers across the world. This means that no matter where someone visits your site from, there’s easy-access data to help your website load faster on their side.
Not all web hosts use a CDN, and many of them don’t offer CDNs on their free or low-tier plans. Choosing a web host without a CDN could potentially cause you to lose customers if they’re coming from faraway places and have to wait too long for your site to load.
Security & SSL Certificates
Security is vital, but overdoing it or choosing the wrong kinds of security measures can place strain on your site, slowing it down. Running third-party scripts or a bunch of security plugins can take up memory and storage space on your site, so while it might be providing good security, it’s hampering you in another way.
Web hosts should provide a number of robust security solutions. There’s nothing wrong with adding a few of your own on top of theirs, but if you feel theirs isn’t good enough and needs a lot of extra help… Then you should probably be considering another web host.
Conclusion
If you’ve never thought about how website hosting affects your website’s speed before, you might be tempted to go out and change your web hosting to improve it! Thankfully, there are a number of steps you can take to boost your website speed without changing hosts entirely.
- ● Optimize your images for the web
- ● Host videos on a separate platform (YouTube, Vimeo)
- ● Remove unnecessary plugins
- ● Enable browser caching
- ● Consider upgrading to a new package with your current host
If you’ve done all of the above and your website is still slow, then switching to a new web host might be a good idea. Do your research, browse through real-people reviews, and choose something that ticks all the boxes. Your website (and your business) deserves it!
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