For most customers, your website is the first place they’ll come across your brand. If that impression is a poor one, with slow loading or sluggish responsiveness, they are unlikely to stick around. As these issues also affect search engine visibility, they can result in even fewer visitors to your business. In this post, we explore why website performance is vital for the success of your digital storefront and what web hosting can do to help.
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Good first impressions matter
It’s not just the attractiveness of your website design that leaves a good impression on your visitors; they are also affected by how quickly your site loads and responds to their interactions. If these take too long, people will leave, some even before the page is fully loaded.
According to Google, 53% of mobile users abandon a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. Google research has also shown that for retail sites, conversions can drop by 20% for each second of delay.
In terms of impact on user engagement, conversions and revenue, these figures are huge and highlight the critical significance of website loading speed to business success. Site speed affects how users view your business, whether they trust you, and crucially, whether they choose to become customers.
Looking for other ways to boost conversions? Read: 8 Tips to Improve Website Conversion Rates
How website performance affects traffic
Websites need to attract visitors to generate income. While search engines can be a major source of traffic, this can only happen if your website is visible in search engine results. Generally, the higher your site ranks in results, the more visitors you will get.
Website performance is one of the key ranking factors that Google and other search engines use to determine where web pages are listed in their results. Today, Google uses its Core Web Vitals to measure three different aspects of site speed that it sees as the most important. These are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures how long it takes the main part of your page to load and should take less than 2.5 seconds.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): This tracks the delay between a user’s action, like a click, and the browser’s response. Ideally, this should take less than 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures usability by calculating how page elements move around during loading. A score below 0.1 is considered good, and anything above 2.5 is poor.
Websites that fall below Google’s benchmark scores for Core Web Vitals, for either desktop or mobile searches, are likely to see their visibility slip in the search results. This can result in a drop in traffic and income.
WordPress user? Read: How to Optimise WordPress Performance on Shared Hosting
How hosting affects performance
While your site’s design might be the face of your business, it’s the infrastructure behind your website that powers it. Just as a stylish car needs a good engine, an attractive website also needs reliable, high-performance hosting.
There are four main types of hosting that websites can use:
Shared hosting: For smaller sites with limited traffic, this is an affordable option where many websites share the same server and its resources. However, performance can be affected by other sites on the server.
VPS hosting: A step up from shared hosting, you still share a physical server, but you get dedicated resources and more of them. As a result, performance is improved and more stable. It’s ideal for growing sites.
Cloud hosting: By spreading your site across multiple high-performance servers, it ensures that if one goes down, runs slowly or sees a surge in traffic, another server can pick up the slack.
Dedicated servers: For large and busy websites, a dedicated server gives you the significant resources of an entire server. While providing the maximum speed, these solutions can be expensive.
Looking for a better dedicated server? Read: How to Optimise WordPress Performance on Shared Hosting
Aside from choosing the best hosting option for your business’s needs, it’s also important to look at the physical hardware that takes care of the processing and networking. As not all web hosts provide the same quality of infrastructure, you should check for high-performance technologies, such as:
- Intel Xeon processors and SSD or NVMe drives (up to 17x faster than traditional HDD drives)
- DDR4 or DDR5 RAM for faster memory access
- Low-latency networks and fast I/O speeds
In terms of speed, these hardware specifications help reduce time to first byte (TTFB) and improve all your Core Web Vitals.
Other hosting features that help boost speed include:
- CDN support for faster global delivery
- Server-level caching and HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 for quicker responses
- Monitoring and diagnostics tools to spot slowdowns before users do
Some solutions, like WordPress Hosting, go further by bundling image compression, lazy loading and database optimisation to help you cut load times.
Conclusion
Poor loading and response times have a double negative effect on businesses. Firstly, they affect search engine rankings, reducing the number of visitors sites receive, and secondly, many of the people who do click through will abandon the site before taking action. The impact on the success of your digital storefront can be extremely damaging. Upgrading to fast website hosting can significantly boost website performance, ensuring visitors remain engaged while improving Core Web Vitals to assist with ranking.
If your digital storefront has high bounce rates and poor Core Web Vitals scores, eukhost can help. Using the latest, high-performance infrastructure and speed-enhancing features, like caching, compression and minification, our hosting solutions are designed to keep your website performing optimally. For more information about our range of hosting plans, visit our homepage.
