Slow website loading and frequent downtime are warning signs that you have outgrown your current hosting solution. It could also mean that your website is not correctly optimised to handle larger amounts of traffic.
At Snack Media, we pride ourselves on understanding the growing pains for websites. We started life as a single podcast before growing into the digital media organisation we are today, so we have a fair few tips for bloggers and publishers having problems with their hosting and who could do with optimising their website traffic.
Here are some of the major headaches publishers face, and how Snack Media can help ease the pain.
1. Your slow website is losing you money every day
If your website feels slow and sluggish and it takes forever to load on a mobile device, there is a good chance that your hosting is slow or you have not optimised your site for speed.
It’s plain and simple – a faster website will make you more money.
Slow Websites:
- Hurt your SEO (search engine optimisation) ranking, leading you to perform worse in search results and reducing your organic pageviews.
- Increase your bounce rate (the rate at which users come to your site and leave without interacting) making your sites appear less desirable to advertisers who value engaged audiences.
- Decrease user experience: The modern user is on the go and mobile web browsing has long since surpassed desktop users for the average sports fan. This makes speed more important than ever.
2. Server outages are costing you money as well as reputation
Once you start making a name for yourself or have an article that starts to rake in the views, the last thing you want is for your server to go down. Frequent server downtime is unacceptable and is a sign that your host can’t handle your site’s growth.
Server downtime can be the fault of:
- Your hosting package: If you are on “shared hosting”, where you share your server resources with tens or even hundreds of different sites, or are just lacking server resources. If another site on the server is hogging all the resources – like RAM or CPU – then your site suffers.
- Lack of resources: If your site starts to slow down when you get larger volumes of traffic this can be a sign that your are lacking server processing power and memory.
- Lack of security: On shared hosting you are more vulnerable as your site shares with other websites. If one of those sites gets hacked then there is a chance yours could become infected too. Google rightfully lowers your SEO ranking if you do not have an SSL certificate for your website (HTTPS) which would encrypt and protect you from many forms of hacking.
Picking a host with the most – How do I speed up my site and stop it from crashing?
To ensure your websites load quickly and don’t crash the moment your articles succeed, there are a few things you our your hosting provider can do.
Increasing Server Resources
A good barometer of a host’s server response is a low “first byte time” or “time to first byte (TTFB)”. This is the time it takes for the first bit of information to come back from the server. A good benchmark time is under 0.2 seconds.
Pick a host that has solid state drive (SSD) memory, sufficient RAM and decent multi core CPUs that can enable you to grow your site accordingly.
Implementing Caching
Caching is the process of temporarily storing data over a short period of time. You can cache your website’s pages and assets (such as scripts, images, etc..) allowing them to load more quickly for your users in different locations on your server and on users’ computers.
Pick a host that offers different types of caching methods that could help speed up your site.
Serving your images, scripts and videos from a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
CDNs are distributed servers or data centres that hold your content in many locations. The closest server to the user is the one which serves them with content, resulting in faster load times for things like images and video. Pick a host who can provide this service and set it up for you.
Secure your site
“Virtual Private Server” (VPS) hosting providers allow you to have your own, unshared server resources, allowing you to fence off your website from others, increasing your security. This type of hosting also allows you to grow much more easily in case you have outgrown your current set up.
Make sure you pick a VPS host that keeps their software environment up to date and has firewalls in place and can provide you with SSL certificates.
Let us help you grow your business
Snack Media can offer publishers:
- Beefy, speedy, affordable hosting using solid state drives (SSD)
- Free implementation of aggressive, optimised caching solutions for your site
- Free* (or very cheap depending on bandwidth) lightning fast CDNS implementation with 38 different data centers across the globe.
- Free SSL certificate for your domain
- VPS hosting with dedicated resources, firewalls and free back ups.
- Technical support for your website
For more information on how we can help with your hosting, cut your costs and you grow your site, revenues and reputation email jamesm@snack-media.com