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A successful website is always built on solid foundations. It would be difficult to list all the components of these solid foundations, but there is no doubt that the speed of the web hosting service is one of them.
After all, if the web hosting is fast, then our future website will also load at a decent speed – provided, of course, that the developers don’t mess it up somehow. Many people fail to recognise that a fast-loading website is key to success, even though statistics show that even tenths of a second matter.
What constitutes a fast website?
Following the introduction, the question naturally arises: what exactly constitutes a fast website? According to research, nearly half of internet users expect a website to load completely within at least two seconds of visiting it.
These are real concerns, which mean that if our website takes just three or four seconds to load – whether due to inadequate web hosting speed or poor programming – we are certain to lose more than half of our visitors.
As every successful website owner is well aware, a minor battle has broken out to make websites as fast as possible, which is why we mentioned above that every tenth of a second can make a big difference. But that’s not all!
Website speed is important to Google too
Ever since Google announced the feature known as the Speed Update, we have officially known that page speed has become a ranking factor. In practice, this means that the faster our website is, the greater our chances of appearing higher up in the search results.
According to SEO experts, this is where tenths of a second can make a difference; if there are two competitors achieving similar results in terms of search engine optimisation, and the only difference lies in their page loading speeds, then the faster site is highly likely to rank higher in the search results. Even if the difference is just 0.1 seconds.
There is no doubt that Google is paying increasing attention these days to ensuring that websites provide the best possible user experience. Alongside high-quality content, this is achieved primarily through website speed; therefore, by focusing on speed, we can address two key requirements of the search giant at once.
Page speed also affects conversions
It has now been proven that page speed has a negative impact on conversions – and a direct one at that. A few years ago, Amazon calculated that a slowdown of just one second is enough to cost them more than one and a half billion dollars a year.
Even when scaled down to a smaller online shop, this can amount to several thousand euros a year, so it’s worth paying attention to page speed and working to improve it, or, if the slowdown is down to the hosting provider, looking for a faster one.
How can we measure web hosting speed?
Having read the information above, many of you may now be left with just one question: how can we measure the speed of our web hosting? There are several methods and tools available to us for this purpose.
One of the best-known tools is Google PageSpeed Insights, which provides comprehensive information on performance and related issues, and can even rate your website in this regard.
As well as Google’s own tool, Pingdom – a free tool that displays speed as a percentage – provides reliable results; Load Impact is also worth mentioning, as it uses visual elements to illustrate the relevant details.