Your businesses website will be a critical part of your marketing strategy and therefore you should take the utmost care and attention to choosing an appropriate website hosting platform and provider.
Just as a solid foundation is crucial for your home, so is the website hosting service your businesses website lives on.
Here are some of the top reasons why your business must invest in a professional website hosting service.
Disruptions are bad for business
Developing and maintaining a website is no mean feat. You’ve spent a significant amount of time and money to see your businesses website come to life.
To make the most of your investment, you want to ensure your website is live 24/7 with at least 99.9% uptime as most hosts promise. However, should you end up with the wrong host, your website will remain elusive to visitors.
Every second that your website remains offline, it affects your brand image, your credibility, your sales and your profitability.
Speed is everything
Today’s web users are used to visiting websites that load super fast. A Kissmetrics study shows that 47% of consumers expect a website to load in two seconds or less.
If your website takes a long time to load, visitors won’t exhibit patience. They are highly likely to hit the back button in search of a website that can offer a better user experience. The same study also found that 40% of users leave a website that loads in more than 3 seconds.
Moreover, every additional second of delay in load time will reduce conversions by 7%.
That’s where a reliable hosting service comes into play. A managed WordPress hosting service is optimised for speed and boasts superfast caching to boost your website’s page load speed.
You could lose your rankings in the search engines
A professionally designed website when combined with a good SEO strategy can deliver some stellar results for your business. A solid content marketing strategy can help boost your website in the search engine results pages so your target customers can find you easily.
However, if the website is occasionally offline when the search engine crawlers are trying to index your website, your rankings will take a hit. Even if your website is not down but takes a lot of time to load, it will adversely affect your rankings too.
Having a provider on hand that understands the application your website is built on
It’s quite common that we speak with business owners and webmasters who have been suffering from poor communication with their website developer (who will often provide the hosting service) or their own hosting provider directly.
If an issue arises it’s crucial that you have a clear line of communication with your developer and website hosting provider in order to get it addressed. It’s also vital your business understands all of the features that the hosting service you are paying for provides.
We recently had a business ask for our assistance in getting their ecommerce website re-indexed by Google. Their website had been compromised and flagged by Google as containing dangerous content – in fact it had close to 2,000 infected files! They had taken a hosting service direct with a provider but were unaware that their service did not provide website backups. We were able to fix all of the compromised files for them and have their site relisted in Google within 24 hours – which whilst being a successful outcome, was not as simple or less stressful as it could have been. I’m happy to say we have now taken over the hosting of several of their websites and are providing web development services too.
Our WordPress Hosting Packages are built specifically for WordPress websites and come with support from an agency that only develops and supports WordPress websites. Our WP Essential package includes regular maintenance and security tasks to identify and address any vulnerabilities within WordPress. It also includes daily website and email backups with 30 restore points held should something unfortunate occur.
It’s of huge benefit to your businesses online success if you choose a secure, reliable and fast hosting platform for hosting your businesses website but also a professional provider that can be there to support you should you need it.
Thanks for reading, Paul – Managing Director.
P.S. I chose the image for this post as I felt it represented putting long-standing support in place.
