Importance of Web Hosting for User Experience

When you’re crafting a website, your goal is
obviously to have as many visitors as you can handle. And in turn, that means
considering each website element, and crafting it so that it improves the
overall user experience. Once you start your online research on everything that
you need to tweak for the best possible experience of your users, you’ll most
often encounter texts on SEO or visual design.

That’s a good indication of one worrying trend
– the fact that many businesses don’t devote enough attention to the backend
side of things; thinking that it’s not as important when it comes to the user’s
satisfaction levels. In reality, though – you’ll find that the technical stuff
like web hosting is equally, if not more important. And in this article, we’ll explore
all the reasons why!

Speed As Search Engine Ranking Factor

When it comes to the importance of choosing the right web hosting plan
for the user experience, one of the major eye-openers came from Google. A
couple of years back, they announced that speed was going to be an official
part of the basis for their search algorithm. Since then, separate independent
research projects from Bing and Google have found that:

• According to Bing, a slowdown of
  just 2 seconds altered queries by almost -2%, and per-user revenue by -4%;
• A delay of 400 milliseconds
  resulted in a change of almost -1% of searches per user, according to Google.

Obviously, this shows that speed is quite an
important factor in the quality of the user experience. And that does not take
advanced logic to realize why this happens. Quite simply – if a user visits a
website that’s slow enough for them to actually notice, they’re not likely to
return to that website regardless of its content; the competitive world of the
2020 Internet is simply like that.

Speed And User Experience

Now, as you might have noticed – we started
talking about the importance of good web hosting for the user experience; but
seemingly drifted off into talking about speed. However – these two things are
basically one and the same. Or rather, one majorly affects the other.

Once you set out to improve your website’s
speed, you’ll find that there are plenty of reasons why it’s experiencing
slowdowns. Some of these are prone to quick rectification; like
making use of a CDN, or resizing images so that their high
resolution isn’t clogging up the website. You could also revisit your plugins
to see if there are any unneeded ones, as well as your text graphics and codes.

However, sooner or later – you will need to
take a look at the backend as well; which is bound to include the servers
themselves.

Hosting And Website Speeds

Let’s take a look at the basics of why website speed is important, from a technical point of view. To put it in the simplest way possible – when a user (or rather, their browser) pings the website you’re managing for any data and information – you want your website to provide the fastest possible response.

In terms of user experience, generally, the
website is expected to respond in under two seconds. And this largely depends
on the quality of your web hosting package. However, while you do need to pay
attention to this; the good news is that proper web hosting providers aren’t
hard to come by these days – certainly not as hard as they were to find a
decade ago.

For instance, you can even find good free web
hosting providers; providing you enough quality while simultaneously not being
a huge burden on your finances. We’ve encountered a couple of such services here, so have a
look, read reviews about them and pick the one that fits you the most.
Naturally, this choice will be an important one to make; but if you do find
proper web hosting, you will be sure that a major potential speed bottleneck is
avoided. And if the service is free of charge, you can save some good amount of
money for other business needs.

The Marketing Side of Things

When you’re providing a service or a product
online, no matter what the niche in question is; you’re bound to be facing a
lot of competition. Even the most generally-applicable product is bound to have
a few equally big competitors – and that’s just something you have to live
with, in the age of the Internet.

This is important to keep in mind when we talk about how good web hosting and the speed your website achieves affect your online marketing efforts. After all, individuals from your target audience visit your website in order to fulfill a specific need or achieve a certain goal. They may be only looking for information, or they could already be ready to purchase something for you; but regardless, once they’re on the website – the last thing you want is for them to experience any glitches or downtime.

You see, most people only consider the website
aesthetics when they think about how users will view their website. But in
fact, the web hosting that lets you achieve the best speeds will majorly affect
how users view your brand. You want to be recognized as an efficient, modern,
and quick; something that you won’t achieve with a laggy website.

Conclusion

As you might have gathered already – the
frontend part of website construction is something most people consider while
optimizing for the maximum user experience. But in reality, the backend stuff
like good web hosting with speedy and roomy servers is equally as important;
even though it’s something that users don’t think about on a conscious level.

However, that’s precisely what makes good
hosting so important for the user experience. If your website experiences
downtime and/or slows down, the average user won’t care about what’s causing
this – they will simply make a mental connection between an inert website and
the brand. Obviously – that’s something you’d want to avoid!

source http://wtf.telenor.com.np/2019/12/27/importance-of-web-hosting-for-user-experience/