Why Your Hosting Location Matters

Speed and performance are critical to your website's success. So much so, that Google even made performance a part of its ranking algorithm. There are many ways to boost website's performance. You can tweak your code, hire an expert to fix your themes and images, use responsive design for mobile devices, and use load balancers and web farms. However, one of the easiest, quickest and most cost-efficient ways to permanently increase the performance of your website is to host it in the cloud.

How is it different?

For anyone who doesn't know the difference between cloud hosting and traditional hosting, the switch might seem insignificant. But even a few seconds shaved off of load times can have a big effect on your customer conversion rates.

A few seconds might seem like an insignificant time frame, but it seriously effects user engagement. When you use traditional hosting, you rely on one server at one location. Most businesses have spikes in traffic during certain times of the day or during seasonal influx. Your server might be able to handle regular traffic, but when the number of visitors increases, server resources exhaust. As a a result, your site performance is too slow for efficient customer conversion.

With cloud hosting, your server is not necessarily in one location. The server resources are shared among data centers located all over the world. Your concern is that the host has data centers at strategic geographic locations where most of your customers reside. When these customers access your website, your cloud host serves site components to the user's browser from the closest data center relative to the user's location.

Although data gets transferred at the speed of light, you always increase performance and reduce load times when servers are located closer to the viewer. If you have international customers, then cloud hosting makes your site user-friendly to customers located across the globe even though your physical business location is in a different country.

How do I test website performance?

Since many site owners are concerned with Google ranking, it's common to use Google's PageSpeed Tools to test site performance. Just remember that a fast site does not mean you'll rank #1 in Google, but it will add to positive signals for your site.

The PageSpeed Tool is beneficial if you know your website could use a performance boost but you're unsure what components are causing problems. The tool gives you some tips and advice on boosting your performance.

If you find that load times are poor, ServerPoint offers cloud hosting with data centers across the US and in Europe. Just a move to the cloud can shave off several seconds from the load time, and it's an affordable upgrade for a busy website owner.

You can perform other optimizations and modifications to your website. For example, images should be optimized for desktop and mobile. You can hire a developer to review your site code, especially the front-end code. A database review will help you find performance issues with any back-end coding. With a full site review and cloud hosting, user engagement is very likely to improve.

If you'd like to learn more about how cloud hosting can help you website's performance, contact ServerPoint.com today! We'll be happy to hear from you!