Practical Ecommerce had a great article a few days ago about How To Increase Page Speed to Help with SEO. It has a number of tips and ways to monitor page speed.

Of interest to me was the end of the article where they list a few other areas for site improvement. These mostly focus on a site’s web hosting company. And this is often overlooked by many online merchants.

Unfortunately, it is one of the largest factors in improving site performance.

Don’t bang your head against the wall

You can optimize your site like crazy, tweaking everything to near perfection. All of this won’t matter if your web host:

• Packs their servers too full
• Hosts too many busy sites on each server
• Uses inferior hardware
• Allows MySQL / databases to be inefficient on a large scale

The bottom line: If your current web host is not “on board” with improving site speed, all of the speed enhancements in the world will not make your site snappy.

Speed Matters

Google is putting a large emphasis on site speed. It may be only one of 200 ranking factors they use to determine where your pages end up in Google searches, but it seems that the tie-breaker many times is the faster responding site.

Beyond Google, customers care about how fast a site is. If the site seems sluggish, or it’s taking too long for pages to load, they can simply click elsewhere to finish their purchase.

One recent study found that up to ONE-THIRD of customers will leave a site if it’s too slow.

How to choose a host that’s fast

So how do you know if a potential host cares about site speed?

1. They have a business / ecommerce focus
Most web hosts that cater to ecommerce websites *should* have servers and hardware that are fast. It’s not always the case, but it’s a better choice over hosts that try to be everything to everyone (like personal / hobby sites).

2. Prices are not too low
Very low-priced hosts make a profit by packing servers full of clients and using inferior hardware. That’s how it works. The end result is you, the website owner, will have a slower website.

3. Ask them how many sites are on each server, and how they monitor server performance
A host that cares about speed knows the answers to these questions. They also don’t try to cram thousands of sites onto each server.

Is YOUR host slow?

Not sure if your host is slow? Curious how much faster your website could be if it were hosted elsewhere?

Take our FREE HOSTING SPEED CHALLENGE and find out!

Here at LexiConn, speed and performance are always a top priority. Through the use of high-end hardware (RAID-10 15k SAS drives, 16 core CPUs, etc…) and lightly loading our servers, we are able to offer fast loading environments for our clients. We continuously monitor performance, and make adjustments as needed.

Maybe that’s one reason why so many successful stores choose to host with us. 

photo credit