The Effect of Web Hosting on Web Load Speed

When Google announced that it would be including web speed in the search engine ranking factors, the word web speed went viral in the SEO world. Six years down the line, some are yet to realise the real essence of web speed. How can one enhance the speed of the site? Which are some of the most crucial factors when it comes to web page speed?

Many web experts have sought to answer this critical question in varied ways. In most of these answers, however, one aspect has consistently been ignored; web hosting. Does web hosting play an essential role in the speed of one’s site? Maybe it is high time you find out.

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Web Hosting and Web Speed Connection

In browsing, you are ideally accessing remote files stored in the web servers. The faster the remote computer, the faster the user will access the requested pages. That makes your choice of web hosting company or package very important. Yet again, the web server is involved in executing thousands of interrelated codes to enable the display of a single page. Executing these codes takes time and that explains why some pages take ages to load depending on their hosts.

For content management based database websites, running the databases questions is an added task to the web browser. Retrieving the needed webpage content involves searching through multiple databases; a code-intensified process. Taking a WordPress site for instance, it can take more than 150 database queries to display a single page! What happens when you have a poor choice of web hosting services? The answers might be pretty obvious!

It is also worth noting that loading webpages involves the web server serving up multiple files including images, CSS and JavaScript. To load the homepage of Amazon for instance, more than 350 requests have to be sent to the web servers. The imagination that such a process is executed in seconds is mind-blowing.

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How to Choose Ideal Web Hosting Packages

Having realised the connection between web hosting and web speed, you might probably be asking yourself the million-dollar question: What makes some web packages to be faster than the rest? There lies a great resemblance between the speed of your computer and the fastness of web hosting packages. They work in an almost similar way.

The very factors that affect the speed of your machine are the ones that influence the difference in web hosting packages speed. They include:

• Fast Hard Drive—for solid state drive, the loading process is faster compared to standard hard drive. That implies greater performance for packages based on the faster hard drives.

• Location of Essential Resources—it is worth noting that ensuring your databases are on the same web server can greatly enhance the speed of sites. This is opposed to the idea of such resources being on the other servers like in the case of shared web hosting.

• Dedicated Resources—it is ideal choosing a web hosting plan offering dedicated resources. Choosing a VPS or dedicated server plan saves you the stress of other websites hogging resources. The latter is mostly common with the shared web hosting plans.

• Enhanced Resources—this is yet another significant difference exhibited in the various web hosting plans. With more advanced web hosting plans come increased processing power and enhanced memory. Collectively, such enhanced resources will escalate the speed of your site because requests will be executed more quickly. Simply advancing from the shared web hosting to better packages such as VPS will do the trick.

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How Will Upgrading to Better Hosing Packages Enhance Your Web Speed?

Not so many people are aware of how much the speed of their websites can increase with a simple upgrade of their web hosting plans. For websites involving several codes to be executed and like Magento websites, it becomes of greater significance.

In a recent page load speed study on the effect of upgrading from shared hosting to VPS plan for a Magento website, interesting outcomes were realised.

The importance of fast web speed might have been overstated for marketing companies before but there lies real benefits of escalating the speed of your website. Notably, the upgraded VPS hosting site recorded 62% improvement in the page load speed! Apparently, enhanced results can also be achieved for the less resource-intensive websites. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the impact might not be huge like in the case of other Magento websites. For content management system websites like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, upgrading your web hosting plans will oversee critical improvements.

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What Makes Page Load Speed So Important?

As noted earlier, the essence of page load speed might have been overstated by many people. However, that doesn’t change the fact that real significance of web load speed exists. For one, faster-loading websites are easily located by search engines. Recent studies have however hinted that page complete load time has minimal effects on webpage load speeds. The correlation between webpage load speeds and search engine rankings might be small but you still need your web pages to load faster to take advantage of even the slightest possibilities.

The greater significance comes in the user experience. Who would wait for a website that takes ages to load when there is an alternative? Like everyone else, web users like saving time. They will always prefer faster loading pages that guarantee better user experience. Slower loading sites affect the subsequent conversion rates. Upgrading your web hosting plans might as well enhance your conversion rates through fastening of web speeds.

Recent studies have also indicated correlations between webpage load speeds and time to first byte. Apparently, Google might be using this as a ranking factor of webpages. That makes it important to have an ideal hosting plan, which will definitely translate to enhanced web speed.

At the end of it all, what matters is the speed of your site. With the greater connection between web speed and web hosting, there is no doubt that upgrading to a better web hosting plan guarantees better results and increase on ROI.