(Image above | Pixabay)
If you’ve managed to put up a great website that people want to visit, then you have a lot to be thankful for. Many people launch websites that merely collect dust for lack of interest. One of the reasons visitors pay repeated visits to a site is because there’s something compelling about the content that makes them want to be constantly engaged by the site. When visitors don’t feel they’re getting anything out of a site, they abandon it—sometimes in under as little as 10 seconds, according to the Nielsen Norman Group, a user experience consulting firm—or they bookmark it for the indefinite future, and you know what that means.
How about the state of your site? Could you be doing something that could derail its success either now or in the near term? Here are possible reasons that your site may go from being popular to passé, and what you can do to avoid that outcome.
Page Load Times
No one has time to wait an extra nanosecond these days. People want web pages to load fast, and they want to get to the content they’re requesting as quickly as possible. That’s really always been the case, but never has it been as critical as it is today when there are so many distractions that are making people more and more “twitchy” or “trigger happy.” Sites that don’t load fast enough end up being vacated because people have quickly clicked or swiped over to another site, or to another device for that matter. You may have the world’s greatest content but without ensuring that the web pages containing that content will be speedy, you won’t stand a chance at keeping visitors.
If you’re an individual with a site, as opposed being a business, you likely have subscribed to a shared web hosting plan. Such plans are convenient and are generally very affordable. Just be aware that because you’re sharing a web server with many other users, that can slow down your site’s performance: if activity on another user’s site is particularly heavy, for instance, it can negatively impact your site’s page load times. It may not be a big deal if you’re sharing relatively static content; but if you’re trying to sell products, then that can derail sales fast, which leads to the next point—considering a dedicated server hosting plan.
Dedicated Server Hosting
Unlike a shared web hosting plan, with a dedicated server hosting plan, your site gets its own server. That means your site will be significantly faster, and because no other sites are there to interfere with your site in any way, there’s significantly greater security. A dedicated web host will cost you a lot more than a shared web host does, but depending on how important it is for your visitors to have immediate access to your content, you might find it more than worth it in the long run.
Website Uptime
The only thing that’s possibly worse than slow page load times is if the site can’t be reached at all. Surely, you’ve had that awful experience of visiting a web page, only to be greeted with a 404 error or some other message saying that the site can’t be reached at that time. It’s annoying because you have no idea when you’ll be able to actually reach the content, and if it’s a site with important information for you, like your bank’s website, then it feels like the end of the world.
For businesses, website downtime can be costly; as a case in point, when Amazon.com suffered a 20 minute outage in 2016, it’s estimated that it cost the international retailer about $3.75 million. To avoid having your visitors endure the agony of downtime, always make sure you use a web hosting provider that can ensure 99.9% uptime.
Moreover, before settling on a web hosting provider, make it a point to ask about how you’ll be able to reach the tech support team to resolve any problems that you’ll have with your site. You want to know that you’ll be able to call someone at any time and on any day to immediately get your issue resolved and your site back up.
Summary
You might have a great website today, but tomorrow it can easily become a different story. Make sure you have a good and reliable web hosting provider that you’ll be able to easily reach when and if the time comes for it. Consider getting your own server to improve your site’s speed and uptime—two site characteristics that are critical to visitors.
