One key element, which often overlooked, that should be investigated as part of your search engine optimisation strategy and whether Google likes your website enough to put it to the top of their listings is how fast your website performs.
Hosting provider
When we speak to clients, we describe hosting as the engine that runs the website. The engine (servers) need to be looked after, maintained and made sure they are running efficiently – this is what we do behind the scenes to make sure when someone visits our client’s websites it loads as quickly and efficiently as possible. Making sure our clients websites load quickly isn’t only for the benefit of their customers and visitors to their websites, it’s also for Google and the search engines. If you website loads slowly and the engine running it isn’t efficient Google will not favor your website because they want their users to get the best experience as possible.
How fast is your website?
There is a quick and easy way to find out how fast your website performs – we use this tool https://gtmetrix.com/.
You’ll expect to see a results page clearly detailing how your website performed similar to one we performed for a client of ours:
Location matters
Getting a cheap hosting package from the USA or overseas may save you a few pounds a month, however, there is a delay across the Atlantic or long distances. Our testing has shown that this can be around a 4 seconds more to your website load time. You’ll not only lose conversions, studies show a 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions, Google will also not favor you kindly for local searches.
So for UK businesses selling to the UK, saving a few pounds a month on hosting costs by hosting overseas may in fact cost you much more than you think!
You get what you pay for!
If you find that your website is slow, and you’re on an overloaded shared host – (if you’re paying less than a £5 a month you more than likely are) you might want to consider either upgrading or getting website hosting from else where. It’s an easy and quick process which will benefit your website’s positioning on Google as well as the experience visitors receive visiting your website.
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