Once you have a new website, it is important that you have the infrastructure around it to keep it humming. There are two parts to doing this properly:
SEO Web Logistics provides quality website hosting to clients on the Gold Coast, Brisbane and around the world. Importantly, our Australian-based servers:
If you sign up with a cheap web hosting service, your website is liable to go offline and experience bouts of poor performance. This is especially the case if your website has a high volume of traffic.
Bargain basement hosting providers typically host too many websites on their servers, placing immense strain on already exhausted resources. Your frustrated customers and visitors will face a diminished user experience, or worse still, website down time.
With a premium web hosting provider, your website is far more likely to stay online and consistently deliver superior performance.
In an age of superfast internet speeds, your visitors expect the web pages on your site to load instantly. And, if they don’t load quick smart, visitors will disappear to another site and seek their information elsewhere. This could potentially cost your business in lost revenue.
According to Google’s own data, 53% of users exit a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Of course, slow web hosting isn’t the only thing that impacts loading times. Be sure to check out our article on ways to effectively Speed Up WordPress sites.
Want to know how fast (or slow) your website currently is? Here are three great tools to use:
Let’s face it, we all hope that nothing goes wrong with your hosting. But when it does, are you going to be able to get the support you need at short notice?
Good web hosting will ensure a complete range of support options are available to you at all times, whether it’s in the event of a website ‘emergency’ or just a general enquiry. Being able to rectify issues that arise in a speedy manner will help ensure that customers and potential customers remain happy with your services.
Aside from potential loss of business, slow loading times and random outages are bad when you’re trying to be found on Google. Not only do website visitors to your site despise slow loading websites, Google does as well. According to Maile Ohye, Senior Principal Product Manager at Google; “2 seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second.”
While you may not be able to get your pages to load in under half a second like Google can, it’s important that you have each of your pages loading in less than three seconds. This will avoid frustrating Google and more importantly, your prospective customers.
Page loading speeds now play a key role in determining the search engine rankings of your website and major search engines such as Google are ruthless in punishing sites that do not offer swift performance for site visitors.
All website data is stored on large servers, but like any technology, it’s not failsafe. Technology is prone to malfunction from time-to-time and all premium hosting providers safeguard against this by ensuring data is backed up to multiple sources at all times. Sadly, with cheaper offerings this may not be the case and unforeseen server damage could spell catastrophe for unsuspecting customers.
We often describe website maintenance as like having a car. Once you buy a new car, you can’t expect it to keep running without regular servicing.
Websites are very similar – they need regular maintenance to ensure they have all the latest updates, are online and functioning properly.
Currently hacking is a big issue for all business sizes. Most business owners do not think it will happen to them, sadly though, all businesses are potential targets. We see it all too regularly – in fact, 30,000 websites are hacked every day!
For WordPress sites (the most common content management system for websites worldwide), hackers try to exploit the vulnerabilities in popular plugins. They will start off by searching for the websites that are using the most vulnerable plugins – this is why it is important that websites are regularly updated.
There are numerous reasons why your website could be targeted including:
While the above list of hacking attacks are among the most common in our experience, we’ve also heard reports of hackers transforming websites into a launch sites for malware attacks on site visitors (your customers).
Importantly, we can never guarantee that there will be no issues when we look after your website maintenance. No one can. What we can guarantee however, is that having the latest updates dramatically minimises your risk. And if your website is ruined, we also protect your online asset by regularly backing up your site.
Chat to SEO Web Logistics for all your hosting and maintenance needs.