For the fastest hosting service you can get for small and medium sized businesses, it’s really quite simple! We recommend hosting with us!
The screen shot you see above shows you our website speed the day this article was written. We used GTMetrix to test our home page and you can do the same with your website. Just go to GTMetrix.com and type in your website address starting with https://
Note: There is another website tool you can use that will scan EVERY page of your website simply by entering your site address. This one, by a company called Experte, is available here.
Why is this kind of speed important?
There are two key reasons you want your website to load as quickly as possible. The first is probably fairly obvious to you. Users are impatient and, these days, they are very intolerant of slow websites. If your site is too slow, users will leave and go to another site.
Here’s some statistics that reinforce the point, gathered from a recent article by WebsiteBuilderExpert:
- 1 in 4 visitors will abandon a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load
- 46% of users don’t revisit poorly performing websites
- 64% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with their site visit will shop somewhere else next time
- a one second delay reduces customer satisfaction by 16%
The first stat above also appears in this article which also points out that users can detect a delay as short as 0.4 seconds! Google researched this and found that a 0.4 second delay resulted in a loss of 8 million searches per day for their search engine. Website speed matters…a LOT!
The second important reason for having a fast website is that it strongly affects your Search Engine rankings performance (SERP) i.e. where your site ranks organically (meaning ‘not paid for with ads’ rankings).
Google wants to give users the best user experience possible, so it’s natural for them to rank the fastest website first (assuming all other factors are equal). Of course all other factors are NOT equal and Google looks at more factors than you can possibly imagine. But that said, website speed most definitely has a very high weighting and slow sites will have a very hard time to rank well.
The Value of Ranking High in Organic Search
Something also worth understanding is how the relative rankings work:
- If you are ranked number one for a given search term, on average you will get 48% of the available organic traffic for that search term
- If you are ranked #2, you will get 12% of that traffic on average
- If you are #3, you get 8%
- If you are #4, you get 6%
- Once you are off page 1, any site listed on those pages gets less than 3% of the available organic search traffic
Now let’s do some simple math. If you are ranked #2 with a search term (maybe it’s ‘wedding dresses belleville’) and you move up to #1 via SEO work, how much does your traffic go up in percentage terms?
Answer: It goes up 400%! Why 400%? Because instead of getting 12 visitors per 100, you will get 48 (on average). And that is four times increase (12 X 4 = 48).
Your percentage increase in traffic is even higher if you move from #3. It goes up 600% if you make it to #1.
And if you were #4 and get to #1, your traffic goes up 800%.
So this is another critical reason as to why you want your website to load as fast as possible. It will help you to move up the search engine rankings and bring in more visitors to your website!
Why is our website hosting so fast?
First, we only host WordPress websites! Our platform is tuned and optimized for WordPress sites only. If you’re currently with another provider and you want to host with us, we’ll migrate your site for free. And in almost all cases, we’ll do it and have it completed the same day you give us the go ahead!
Second, we use CloudFlare for Enterprise CDN, CloudFlare’s highest service levele offering which, among other things, includes prioritization on CloudFlare’s network. Of coure there are many more benefits to CloudFlare for Enterprise which you can review here.
Third, we utilize what we consider the best premium cache plugin and provide and configure that on every website we host.
And our hosting solution is a fully managed solution – we take care of your website, keeping the software it runs on fully up-to-date.
Check out our hosting services page for ten reasons why you should host your website with us.
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