Starting up an ecommerce or online store requires thoughtful consideration. You can’t overlook one factor and focus on others, as this may impact the performance of your website. In fact, website performance should never be overlooked. Internet users and average visitors these days are just as concerned with their experience on a specific ecommerce website as with the products offered on it. It is observed that 57% of visitors will leave the website if it is taking more than 3 seconds to load. The loading speed of a website mostly depends on the web hosting which provides the website with a server. This server holds the backend resources of your website. For eCommerce hosting, it is extremely important to choose a quality web host server capable of providing the ideal website loading speed and exceptional uptime (i.e. website loading time) to keep your ecommerce website online and running fast at all times. There are three different types of web hosting you can get for your websites: shared, VPS or virtual private server hosting, and cloud hosting. Every type comes with its own pros and cons. Here is what you need to consider before choosing a web host in order to have the best chance at success in ecommerce.
Web Host with High Performance:
Your ecommerce site needs to perform exceptionally well in order to compete with other ecommerce sites in the trade. The performance of your site, as discussed earlier, mostly depends upon the web hosting. Therefore, you need to opt for a web host that offers speed and reliability without any compromise. If your site fails to perform better and takes more than 3 seconds to load then you should expect more than half of your traffic to leave your website without waiting for it to load completely. Unfortunately, the majority of consumers who leave your website will not return to your website again. It means you are losing half of your traffic before your site even loads completely, which is bad in terms of reputation and business.
The low loading speed problem mostly occurs because of shared hosting which is slow and comes with frequent downtime. This type of web hosting usually works better with blogs and other websites but it is unacceptable and unsuitable for ecommerce websites that need high performance and exceptional loading speed to convert most of the traffic that comes to their site. There is also a need for careful selection of a web host, as some hosts may lack substantial infrastructure and ultimately become the reason for slowdowns and website crashes. A number of web hosting companies claim to be the best and fastest around but fail to deliver expected results. Therefore, substantial research is necessary before you make your decision. Otherwise, you are going to regret your choice later. You can take necessary information like uptime stats and ping data from Google and relevant blogs to reach a right and facts-driven decision.
Be Careful About CDNs, Bandwidth, and File Storage:
Before we go on to describe the role of CDNs in performance of a website, you should know what CDN actually means. CDN is a short form of content delivery network, basically CDNs form a network over a wide area, but especially in the case of popular web hosts providing hosting services to a wide number of websites. The function of these CDNs to support the connection between a user browsing far away from the main server and website. A nearby CDN establishes the connection with the user instead of connecting to the main server. This makes website loading speed much faster. Therefore, if you are running an ecommerce website, make sure the availability of CDN is included in your website’s hosting plan. Additionally, make sure your host is offering performance and uptime monitoring data with the hosting plan. This monitoring data will help you stay aware of your performance and get immediate notifications if something goes wrong with your website like the server goes down or speed of website becomes unusually slow.
Also make sure that the web host you are choosing is capable of providing enough resources to handle loads of files as ecommerce sites need a lot of file space. This is because ecommerce retailers add visual interest with use of a number of images with every single product listed on the website. Similarly, you should also make sure whether the web host you are choosing is capable of providing you with substantial bandwidth as it also plays an important role in overall performance of your website.
