What is a visit to your site worth? That is the most important question, and I think every business owner should know what that dollar amount is. For Clockwork, one visitor could become a potential client which, in a great situation, could be a whole custom rebrand of the site which could easily bring in $10,000-20,000 or more.
When a potential client is worth that much, we want a low threshold for someone to stay and check out our website. If your site loads slow or looks straight out of 2010, you lose trust before they read a word. There are basically three easily attainable goals:
- Quick load time (I’m focusing here today)
- Attractive site (sets up the Know, Like, Trust framework)
- Device agnostic (looks good on mobile and desktop)
The Problem With Cheap Hosting
Most business owners set up hosting once and forget about it. As a business owner myself, I get it. There are usually bigger fires to put out. But your hosting provider has a real impact on how fast your site loads, and what feels “fine” can quietly cost you customers.
To keep prices low, most cheap hosting puts your website on a single server alongside dozens or even hundreds of other sites. That setup is called shared hosting, which isn’t necessarily bad. The trouble starts when a provider crams too many sites onto an underpowered server to cut costs. You have no visibility into who your neighbors are or what they’re running, so when one of them gets hacked, sees a traffic spike, or runs sloppy code, your site slows down right along with it. You’re sharing resources and hoping everyone else has their act together.
So the real issue isn’t sharing a server. It’s cheap, overloaded hosting, and there’s a meaningful difference between the two. Done right, shared hosting works great. Done cheap, you’re paying in performance, even if it’s not on the invoice.
What Good Hosting Looks Like
Good hosting will cover all of these these things:
- CDN (Content Delivery Network): A CDN is one of a few tools that helps improve site loading speed
- Daily backups: Restorable and stored offsite
- Good security: A guarantee that if the site gets hacked, the hosting company will un-hack it (What’s your current WordPress security strategy?)
- A staging environment: Lets you test plugin updates, design tweaks, new features on a copy of your site before pushing them live. One click copies it back when you’re ready.
- SSL certificates: Make your site load with “https” and show the padlock in browsers. Google penalizes sites without it, but some hosts charge extra for this part.
- A conservative shared hosting strategy: If you are using shared hosting, ask your hosting provider how many sites will be on the shared server with you, and how they will go about monitoring the sites on that server so that other sites don’t bog yours down. If they can’t give you a clear answer, that’s a red flag.
- Support you can trust: I’ve dealt with hosting companies that took days to respond or couldn’t answer basic questions. Good support responds fast and knows what to fix.
Moving to a higher quality hosting provider can significantly improve the performance of your site. We regularly see sites on lower quality hosting with a GTMetrix grade of a D or E move to an A or B on our hosting servers with no other changes to the website. That means sites are often cutting load time in half, and improving all of the metrics that Google looks at for SEO for your site, just by moving to a higher quality hosting setup.
If you can cut your load time in half, do it! Especially if you really are only going to be paying $30 or $40 a month extra.
Why Google Cares About Your Load Time
People are impatient, but more importantly, so is Google. You might think your site is SEO friendly. Maybe you even dropped some cash on an SEO expert to perfect the wording, but if Google doesn’t index the site because the load time is too slow, you wasted your time and money. Back in 2015, Google warned:
We’re seeing an extremely high response-time for requests made to your site (at times, over 2 seconds to fetch a single URL). This has resulted in us severely limiting the number of URLs we’ll crawl from your site. — John Mueller, Google
So, if your site doesn’t load under two seconds, your content might not even be in the search engine’s database. Pretty epic.
Today, Google’s standards are even stricter. With Core Web Vitals (a focus point of our SEO audit) now a ranking factor, your site needs to load in under 2.5 seconds for the Largest Contentful Paint, maintain stable layouts, and respond to interactions within 100 milliseconds. Slow hosting is not conducive to any of these things.
When and if traffic does spike, shared hosting can’t handle it. A viral post or press mention overwhelms the server you’re sharing with dozens of other sites. Google’s crawlers hit those same slow response times, damaging the Core Web Vitals scores you need for rankings.
Hosting That Boosts Your Business
That hosting decision from years back? It’s still affecting your site today. Good hosting needs to handle those unplanned traffic spikes, stay secure, and load fast.
We’re not here to upsell you on features you don’t need. Some hosting companies charge extra for things like SSL certificates or push premium add-ons that sound mission-critical but aren’t. SSL is included with all our plans at no cost because it’s baseline, and every site needs it.
We built our hosting infrastructure on DigitalOcean using partitioned servers for better security and performance. Most of our website hosting and maintenance plans include CDN, daily backups with up to 90-day retention, security monitoring, staging environments when required and speed optimization. The actual hosting migration is free for all clients.
Not sure if your current hosting is the problem? Our free website audit takes about five minutes and shows you where you stand. You can also contact us about any questions.
