There are countless web hosts out there.
Dozens? Hundreds?
To make matters worse, they all sound awfully alike on the surface. How do you tell them apart when they basically all offer the same features? How do you peel back the marketing speak to objectively say one is better than the other?
It’s incredibly difficult.
Instead, it usually takes you signing up for some long-term agreement, going through the hassle and expense to move your site, only to have buyer’s remorse six months down the line.
A wrong choice of web host will not only impact your website performance, but will be detrimental to your content marketing, SEO, and customer acquisition.
Thankfully, there are a few things you can look for when evaluating a web host. And best of all, they’re concrete things that can quickly separate the good from the bad.
That’s why you have to check with an online rank tracker if your metrics improve or worsen in time with the web host you chose, as it can be a big factor regarding the SEO performance of your website.
Here are the top three ways to evaluate a web host’s performance.
Web Host Performance Metrics 1- Uptime
Every hosting website makes the same, bold claims around “uptime.” This refers to the amount of time your website is basically up and running, as opposed to “down” when it gets knocked offline for an extended period of time.
Dreamhost, for instance, guarantees “100% uptime”
Most hosts will make the same bold claim with a percentage that is awfully close to flawless. However, is that the reality? Are you really going to get perfect uptime?
Related: Best Web Hosting For Beginners
No, of course not. Especially when you consider even a tiny issue can result in minutes or hours of downtime.
For example, an uptime of 99.9% sounds pretty darn good, right? And it is! Except, when you run the math, a 99.9% uptime results in almost an hour of downtime over the course of a month.
Now, imagine if that hour of downtime happens during a big sale or on Black Friday? And over the course of a year, you’re now looking at hours and hours of your site potentially going down for the better part of a day.
That’s why uptime and downtime are the most important part of a web host’s performance.
There is some good news and bad news, though.
The bad news is that you will have to use (or find) a reputable third-party data center, since basically every web host will only tell you that they’re “perfect.” I’d recommend using Pingdom, because the second piece of bad news is that you often have to track uptime over the course of a few months (or years) to accurately judge it.
A web host either has their own data center infrastructure (like Godaddy) or is renting servers in a colocation data center. Running a data center is an expensive and time-consuming option so most web hosts will outsource this. It’s worth checking the reliability of your chosen web host’s data center.
Sometimes, a one-time issue might bring your site down. Or, one month might hit 100% uptime only for the second to plunge down to 90%.
Related: Bluehost Review
Web Host Performance Metrics 2- Speed
If the most important job of any web host is to keep your site online for as long as possible, the second is making sure the site is fast enough for visitors from all over the world.
In anticipation of this new mobile-first algorithm, Google released some findings on mobile websites in a variety of different industries around a year ago.
Related: Website Speed Test Tools To Upgrade Site Performance
With a 20% increase in mobile shopping over the last 18 months, it’s crucial that your mobile website is up to the task of keeping up with customers’ preferences. You can achieve your goal by hiring a web deb design company, which will not only help you make a website on WordPress but will also bring to life the design you have in mind.
Related: Best Ways To Increase Site Speed
The vast majority of websites are too slow on mobile, which impacts everything from people staying on-site to them eventually buying anything (and thus, where you show up in search results). Want your content to stand out amongst 4 million daily blog posts? Speed can help. Want to convert prospects into sales? Speed can help:
“Similarly, as the number of elements—text, titles, images—on a page goes from 400 to 6,000, the probability of conversion drops 95 percent,” according to their report.
One reason is that every single second delay will cause a huge fraction of visitors to head for the exits. If you doubt that possibility, just use any free website traffic checker and you’ll see real numbers.
Think about it this way.
How much do you currently spend to drive one visitor to your site?
Let’s say it’s a buck per click. Not too bad on the surface.
But what happens when your conversion rate starts to take a nosedive because pages take too long to load? Or what happens when the competition starts encroaching, pushing up those costs to a few bucks per click?
Related: How To Fix LCP Issue
Whether or not you’re spending that money on AdWords or promoting content to drive visitors organically, the same rules apply. Digital marketing is a numbers game. And your bottom line is 100% dependent on driving down the costs to bring people in while maximizing the number of people who stick around to buy.
Multiple studies back up this same point. For instance, according to Freshdesk:
One of the first things you should address when improving your digital customer experience is reducing those dreaded slow load times that we just discussed.
- AutoAnything cut their load time in half and saw a 13% increase in sales and a 9% increase in conversion rate.
- Edmunds.com reduced their load time by seven seconds and saw a 17% increase in page views and a 3% increase in ad revenue.
In other words, this isn’t an exception or some fluke. It’s happening right now.
Related: How To Fix FCP Issue Longer Than 3 Seconds
And while most savvy site owners focus on hard costs like what they’re paying to drive each visitor, very few are factoring in how site performance is dropping conversions while skyrocketing their cost per acquisition. Slow site speeds will also negatively impact your SEO efforts and ability to increase your domain authority.
If you need to see where you stand, simply head over to Google’s Test My Site tool and plug in your URL. It’ll give your site a rundown on both desktop and mobile, flagging the biggest issues plaguing your site speed.
There are things you can do
You can usually boil down the most common culprits down into three categories:
- Technical: how your site is put together
- Hosting: how your site files are being stored, managed, and sent to users
- Large files: how you’re treating images, video, etc.
But your site will only ever be as fast as your hosting provider. So if your host is slow, your website will be slow. Period, end of the story.
Web Host Performance Metrics 3- Security
You can actually prevent a lot of hacks.
Weak passwords, for instance, account for
Easy passwords are easy to crack. Period, end of the story.
Related: Best Accessibility Testing Tools For Your Website
Brute force attacks will run through a series of letters or numbers, trying to methodically hit upon a combination that works. The likelihood of a password being hacked usually comes down to simple math at the end of the day.
Passwords with fewer letters, numbers, symbols, and cases are usually easier and faster to hack because there are less combinations hackers need to try.
However, there are some Ddos attacks that you can check here.
The next two major loopholes can be boiled down to running old software.
Related: How to Make Website Trustworthy?
The last one is in your hands, but this one comes down to who you’re trusting to run your site.
Most people that start a blog create a WordPress site through their hosting provider, even when running on a free trial initially. That means they’re 100% reliant on the site being set up properly by them, or else…
Related: How to Create A Website
WordPress runs on PHP. And like most software, the latest versions are always the most secure, while older versions are less secure. The problem is that many, many websites are still running on these less secure, older versions of PHP.
Now, most common WordPress users probably don’t even realize they’re running on outdated technology. So why are they? Again, it comes back to their hosting provider and their attention to detail (or lack of it).
The second issue a weak server or hosting can cause you is that it will inevitably buckle under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack.
If someone can’t hack their way inside, they can do the next best thing with a DDOS attack by bringing it down completely. These attacks essentially ‘flood’ a server, overwhelming its resources until it gets knocked offline for an extended period of time.
For example, in 2017 hackers attacked Dreamhost to bring down a white supremacist site. The problem is that the target site isn’t the only one affected, as other sites on these shared servers can also be collateral damage. That means other Dreamhost hosting sites were also knocked offline with over 41 outages for up to five hours over the course of a few months.
Once again, better, security-minded hosts take more precautions to limit this damage. Part of what you’re paying for with popular managed options like WP Engine and Kinsta are constant software upgrades to the latest, secure versions of PHP and extra resources to fend off potential DDOS attacks.
You can also add a few additional tools, like Sucuri, WordFence, or Cloudflare to help add firewalls, scans, and more to prevent or limit the damage these outside attacks can cause.
