When you are first starting out with WordPress hosting, you’ll find there are tons of options. Many hosting platforms offer a lot of promising features like a good price, an easy to use platform, and great storage capabilities. All of these features are important when deciding which host to use. However, I believe the most important and often overlooked feature is speed. Fast WordPress hosting has a range of great benefits for your business and it is one of the most essential features you need to consider when choosing a host. So I decided to write this guide on why you need fast WordPress hosting, what to look for in a host, and which WordPress host is the best when it comes to speed.
Five Ways Fast WordPress Hosting Benefits Your Business
There are many ways that fast WordPress hosting can help build and grow your business, here are the five most important:
1. Better User Experience: The most important benefit to fast WordPress hosting is how it supports a better user experience. Users come to your website looking for quality and information. When you provide them with these things with easy navigate and fast load times, it gives them an enjoyable experience which leaves a positive impression of your brand. This good impression will help you build your customer base, encourage repeat visits, and help you grow your business.
2. Add More Website Features: The online marketplace is highly competitive and one of the best ways to stand out is to offer some eye-catching and engaging content on your website. With fast WordPress hosting, you can add features that take up a lot of bandwidth like videos, graphics, and animations without it causing problems for your website. The faster speed you have on your website, the more of these cool features you can add without slowing things down.
3. Keep Your Visitors: You spend a lot of time, effort, and money into directing traffic to your website. So when you get the attention of a visitor, you want them to stay and enjoy your website content. Studies have shown that if a page takes more than 4 seconds to load, nearly 25% of users will move away from the page. 60% will abandon the page altogether and never return if the page takes 10 seconds or more. Load time is critical in our fast-paced world. Fast WordPress hosting is a way to guarantee your page loads quickly for every visitor who comes to your site, so they don’t end up getting frustrated or distracted and moving on.
4. Higher Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP): Google and other search engines like Yahoo and Bing use very complex algorithms to determine where your website lands on their search results. Mastering this algorithm is a huge challenge, especially because they don’t share exactly how it works. One thing they have shared is that load time does factor into your ranking position on search queries. Therefore, Fast WordPress hosting needs to be part of your business’ larger SEO strategy. When choosing a site host, you absolutely need to consider speed as a factor if you are going to rank high in search results.
5. Supports Mobile Optimization: Nowadays, most people use the internet with their phones, so any content you offer needs to be mobile optimized. In fact, 25% of people use their phone exclusively to search content online. Fast load speeds are critical for mobile optimization because of the complexities of connectivity and hardware capabilities. When a user is on the go, they aren’t going to have the fastest internet connection and they may not always be on the latest mobile device. You need to make up for these limitations by having a website that loads quickly, otherwise, you will lose the opportunity to engage these customers with your content.
Taking advantage of these five benefits of fast WordPress hosting will ensure that all the efforts you put into building your business are met with a return.
How To Determine The Speed Of A WordPress Host
Now that you know why you should consider speed as a factor when choosing fast WordPress hosting, you may be wondering how to determine speed. If you already have a live website, I recommend starting by running a speed test with Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see where your website stands. If you’ve found that your website has a slow load time, then it’s time to consider a new host. On the other hand, if you are just starting out, you’ll need to factor in the speed offerings when deciding which hosting platform to utilize. If you’re like me and aren’t particularly tech-savvy, this may be a confusing thing to understand when you are first starting out. Ultimately though, it’s not tough. Here is what you need to look for on a hosting platform:
Cache Features: Cache stores commonly visited pages so they load quickly every time a visitor comes to the website.
Content Delivery Network (CDN): Content delivery network reduces network latency by putting the physical hardware close to your audience.
Once you have established a host has these critical features, all you need to do is estimate the number of visitors you expect per month. Then you can determine the plan that best suits your needs.
The Fastest WordPress Hosting Service
I’ve tried a couple of different WordPress hosting options over the year and found that many of the sites that offer cheap prices but don’t offer cache and CDN, end up costing me money in lost visitors. After a lot of trial and error, I realized that I needed to invest in a better WordPress Hosting platform that really does offer some of the highest speed capabilities on the internet. The best host for fast speeds I’ve found is WPEngine. WPEngine has Evergreen Cache, CDN, and the plan I chose can handle 100,000 visitors a month. Since I’ve made the switch, users stay longer on my website and I’ve even seen an uptick in conversion rates. I’ve also been able to add some engaging, storage heavy content without worrying a lag. So to get all the benefits of fast WordPress Hosting, I would definitely recommend WPEngine.
