Knowing your website speed is one thing, but if you have it running at its full potential and it’s still not at the ideal speed, there is still the matter of your web host. The speed of your website affects the bounce rate, sales conversions, search ranking, and overall user experience.
So, no matter how fast your website is, if the web hosting provider is not performing to the expected capacity — the performance of your website will still be the same. Once you discover that your web hosting provider is having a slow day, it is imperative that you do something about it to make sure that your business is never affected negatively.
In this blog, we will show you different ways to know the speed of your web hosting provider and what to do when you encounter speed issues with your web host.
Photo by Tumisu from Pixabay
Table Of Contents
- Web Hosting Speed Affects Website Speed – Here’s Why
- How To Check The Speed Of Your Web Hosting Provider
- Is Your Website Fast Enough?
- The Issue Is With The Web Hosting Provider – What To Do Next
Web Hosting Speed Affects Website Speed – Here’s Why
“The web hosting provider simply holds my website on a server – what could possibly be the problem?”
Here’s the thing—when your website is accessed in a browser, the request immediately goes to the server that is hosting your website. So, even if your website itself is already at optimal speed if the server itself responds slowly – it will basically slow down the load time of your website. So, knowing how to check the speed of your web hosting provider is the first step for you to determining why your website is not performing at par.
How To Check The Speed Of Your Web Hosting Provider
Here are a few ways to check the speed of your web hosting service provider:
- Browse Through Your Web Host Users’ Reviews. First and foremost, this is what you should be looking into even before signing up for a web hosting service. Look up users who are registered on the same provider and see what they have to say about the speed.
- Check The Speed Of Another Website Under The Same Web Host. You’ve heard from the reviews. Now, check the websites of these users and how they are doing in website speed.
- Check The Speed Of Your Web Host’s Website. Certainly, your web host should run their own website from their own servers. It’s a quick test to see if their own servers run speedily just as their website would do.
- Test TTFB (Time to First Byte). Time to First Byte test is a quick way to see how quickly your server would respond by the time the first byte loads up for your page. Click here to see how you can do a TTFB test from Chrome.
Is Your Website Fast Enough?
Now that you have done the speed test for your web hosting provider, how do you know if the results you got are good or bad?
The metrics from your speed test should only be at the 2-3 seconds mark. If it’s 3 seconds or higher, make sure to check the opportunities pointed out by the test for you to check how you can improve your website speed.
Why just 2 to 3 seconds? Here’s the reasoning behind it: a customer will abandon a website if it does not load up within 2 to 3 seconds. Any more than that and a visitor can simply leave or lose interest. That is why you have to make sure that your website pages load up within this timeframe to keep your customers on the hook.
The Issue Is With The Web Hosting Provider – What To Do Next
If the issue is with your web hosting provider’s server, there is still a lot you can do to make sure that it can still be improved:
- Report the issue with your web hosting provider. Check any emails or updates if they are currently running maintenance at a certain period, which may cause slow website load times.
- Know where your web hosting servers are located. Test the website speed depending on where your target audience is. For instance, if your target audience is in Singapore and the servers are located in the United States, there will be significant latency in the response. It is important to have your website with a provider who has multiple server locations worldwide – if your target is global; and servers within the country of your target audience for a specific country.
- Free hosting is very limited in terms of features and benefits. If you are running on free hosting, all the more that you will need to upgrade to a web hosting plan that will suit your speed and support needs.
- Have a look at your web hosting plan. A basic hosting plan may be adequate when you initially launched your website, but the more you get visitors and the more content you put in – the higher need for your website to keep up its speed from when it started. Upgrading to a higher website plan will be necessary the bigger your market becomes.
Before even building your website, it’s important that you are working with a trusted web hosting provider that matches your desire for optimum performance. CLDY’s service guarantees leave you with nothing but the best technologies to support your website, whenever or wherever it is accessed. Find out here what it means to be with a web host that fulfils your website needs — check our web hosting plans today.
