Apr
Is your hosting plan hurting your company’s overall bottom line?
A web developer should strive to maintain high page load times for his or her websites. A fast loading website can boost the time a visitor stays on your site and the likeliness that he or she is willing to engage on your site, whether it’s a purchase, download, completed form or advertisment click. Additionaly, search engines like Google have indicated that a website’s load time is one of many factors used to rank a site in the result pages. So it really goes without saying then that you should engage in file management practices and other hosting options in order to cultivate a more streamlined website that satisfies your visitors and keeps your rankings and revenue intact.
File-Based Page Loading
File compression is your first mode of action to remedy those achingly long page loading times. Although Gzip is a popular file compression tool, it was alleged to actually contribute to a slow loading time. As a result, here are five alternative tools to really compress your files allowing your website to load more quickly:
- Dojo ShrinkSafe – By caching CSS and JavaScript files, this tool compresses the files to smaller file sizes with the help of variable name crunching.
- Google Closure Compiler – This tool effectively compresses your data, and in doing so, checks for any errors in the code. You can be sure of eradicating any syntax errors that may harm your website’s overall loading scheme.
- Packer – This JavaScript file compression tool is equipped to guide you on effectively compressing and decompressing your website’s files.
- YUI Compressor – This tool is notable for being one of the most efficient JavaScript file compression tools, complete with safety features and effective compression measures.
- JSMin – If you want to retain variable file names for consistency (especially for name-sensitive scripts), this safe compression tool lowers file size very safely.
Once you have compressed your files, page loading time will most definitely improve. This will allow your visitors to navigate through your website without the issue of loading time. With the impatience present in each web surfer, complying with loading time standards is integral in obtaining high page ranking.
Server-Based Page Loading
You may experience slow loading times not just due to file compression, but also the nature of your hosting plan as a whole. Shared web hosting plans involve a server with other accounts sharing resouces (bandwidth, CPU, disk space, RAM, etc.) which can cause quite a few loading troubles. Since your data capacity is shared among other accounts, you may experience downtime and even slow loading processes, especially if they’re running heavy scripts. With dedicated server hosting and VPS hosting, you can eliminate the hassle and obtain optimal loading speeds whenever you see fit.
- Dedicated Server Hosting – Dedicated server hosting allows you to have control of your very own server and its resouces However, this can be expensive to maintain because of your server’s isolation from others. But, for page loading purposes, dedicated server hosting can be the most beneficial, especially for online businesses.
- VPS Hosting – or Virtual Private Server hosting, is an intermediate type of hosting between dedicate and shared. With VPS hosting, you will be granted specific space on a server, where your files are “virtually” separated from others. The partition allows page loading time not to be compromised, allowing effective data transfer. Because of a technically shared server experience, VPS is generally cheaper compared to dedicated server hosting.
In analyzing your company’s overall bottom line, the hosting plan you pick should reflect the amount of data you need. Web developers are looking toward revolutionizing page loading time, because it plays a very important role in determining visitor conversion and page ranking. In that respect, it becomes wise to choose a dedicated server hosting plan or a VPS hosting plan over a shared hosting plan in order to cultivate effective loading time. After all, keeping your files hot and ready to load when needed is important in the Internet highway.
Brian Flores is a SEO and copywriter for InMotion Hosting, one of the top dedicated server providers in the country. He works with a team of awesome writers to post useful tutorials on WebHostingHelpGuy. You can follow him on Twitter @WHHG_InMotion or @BrianAFlores.
Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.Related posts:
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This is a great article from Brian, Justin. And, it is very timely to my dilemma at this moment. I believe that my loading time is just a tad slower than I want it and I need to address it as soon as I can. I am thinking about getting local hosting instead of the one I am using now. Decisions, decisions…
- Wes -
Very good points.
Hosting is the most important aspect of an internet business.
Imagine someone visits your website and the website is down because the host is having technical issues or just overloaded.
Goodbye visitor.
So having a good host is vital.
This is great article and the points you used i really impressed keep blogging.
i think choose the right hosting plan or hosting provider is the key to starting an online bussines,
i remember when starting our a small Web hosting service in my my country an did used a very bad hosting provider it really affected the site, and i volved not to ever consider cheap price to quality hosting services.
Anyway i finally used hostage to the site and had never had any issuse, i think i learned my lesson.
thanks for this post
Choosing the right hosting plan or provider is one of the crucial decisions that you have to take. Make sure that it is reliable and serviceable so it will not impede the success of your business.
If you are planning to create a money-making web site, listen to this man! He obviously knows what he is talking about. I myself get tired of web sites that consume several minutes before full info is displayed. Sometimes, I tend to just give up especially when my memory optimizer slows down everything. Thanks for the info.
Nowadays Google is obsessed with speed and it is a signal in the search ranking algorithms. Faster sites also create happy users and improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.
I have been on hosting before where I have more than 3000 files. A files are about the lyrics of a certain songs. The problem is my hosting is too low and there are so many file not found reported by google bot even if the files are present there. For those readers of this post it’s better to follow the guidelines presented here.
If you have made a wrong choice of a hosting plan how difficult is it to change?
If you want a fast website then dedicated hosting is the way to go. Having said that, it is not always necessary for all websites.
I have to say I don’t think it makes much difference in Google. I know they’ve said it’s become an issue but I think it’s a very small one. It’s one of around 200 things they take into consideration, and a fairly minor one compared to many of the others. Very slow sites will suffer in Google, but the difference between quick and very quick in unlikely to effect the ranking of a site.
Not only does virtual private server hosting allow websites to load fast, it ensures far better security than what is provided on a shared hosting platform.
Because VPS accounts are insulated from each other and act as though they are true dedicated servers, your risk of being hacked or infected with a virus intended for someone else is greatly minimized. Now, you will be in charge of your server’s firewall configuration and virus protection.
I didn’t realize how slow WordPress can be if not setup correctly. I thought my hosting may have been the culprit, but first I tried to enable GZIP, compressed and combine CSS/JS files and installed W3 Total Cache as well as cutting down on some images that were not really needed. That cut my load times by more than half!
This is really true. Hosting plan may affect the overall performance of a certain business specially the online business where low internet connection may prevent the search bot to crawl to your website and this result to your site not being rank in search engine and never show in any searches.
I am using a local hosting provider and he was just blowing out my business. I am a chicago personal trainer and my business website is one of the most important thing for me. After reading some blog posts i have switched to some brand names but my question is does a dedicated server works better than a hosting plan from some brand companies?