Let’s look at how Linux VPS hosting can have a positive impact on the speed of your website. Some of us can remember the old days of dial-up internet connections and how slow they were to load. You could type in the URL, go make yourself a sandwich, and still watch it load by the time you got back.
But today, internet speeds continue to get much faster and website load speeds are having to keep up if sites want to be competitive with consumers.
Here’s everything that you need to know about your website’s performance.
Website Speed By the Numbers
First, let’s look at some general statistics regarding consumer behavior and websites. Page views are determined by the speed with which they load. If a site loads quickly, it greatly increases the odds that the consumer will browse the site and explore further into it.
- Almost half of all website visitors (47%) will wait no more than 2-3 seconds for a website to load. If it isn’t loaded in that time frame, they assume the site is down or not worth visiting and move on to a competitor’s site.
- Over three-fourths (79%) of customers who shop online would not shop with a site a second time if they experienced an issue with the site, such as poor load time.
- Almost half of those same customers (44%) would tell their friends about their negative experience with a site, thus hurting future sales for the site.
- If you average $100,000 in sales each day, a simple one-second delay could add up to over two million dollars annually in lost sales.
- Every little bit helps. By increasing load times from seven seconds down to two, one website was able to increase page views by 25%. What’s more, this generated an almost 12% increase in sales.
What Else Is Impacted by Page Speed
Another thing to keep in mind is that page load times are used by Google when they compute a website’s search engine rankings. If a site takes too long to load, it will be placed lower on search engine results. In general, if you are not on the first page of website search engine results, your sales will greatly suffer. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the practice of using everything at your disposal to ensure that your site ranks high. Load times are one very important factor in this algorithm.
How Hosting Relates to Speed
Your page’s load time relates to a few different factors including memory and bandwidth usage. If you are using a shared hosting plan, then you have to split these resources with the other websites that are stored on your host’s server. If one site is getting a traffic spike, then this can cause them to monopolize the resources and slow down your website. Just a few instances of this can drive users away.
In order to prevent this, you can instead switch to a virtual private server (VPS).
VPS hosting means that your site will still be on a shared server. These days, that’ll be on a regular or NVMe SSD for greater speeds at the start. However, this server will be partitioned into multiple virtual machines as if each were an independent dedicated server. You will have your own designated resources and won’t have to share these, meaning that your website will be more responsive and with better overall uptime. This also provides better security against cyber attacks as you’re less likely to be affected by issues from neighboring VPSs.
You get this without having to pay for your own server, an expense that could run you over $100 per month.
The VPS Solution
VPS hosting is an easy solution to make your company’s website run faster. InMotion Hosting can set you up with a virtual private server that can offer you significantly faster load times. Faster page load times turn visitors into paying customers.
