I guess it’s already been a year since I wrote about a website I have that lost 25% of its traffic when the site load time slowed down.
When it comes to your business and your website, hosting is incredibly important.
For websites I’ve had I’ve usually eased my way into better hosting.
You start with a regular shared hosting plan. Those can cost less than $75/year and they can get you started.
But as your business grows it’s important to upgrade, which I did two years ago.
But recently there have been issues with uptime and speed on the GBW website. So it was time to upgrade again.
The GBW Website Is Our Salesperson
For GBW, the website is the salesperson.
The site brings in the traffic and converts visitors into clients.
When the site is down we’re not getting new clients.
When the site is slow we’re not getting new clients.
So when things you a little wrong you hope you’re with a host that can help. In my experience, most hosts are pretty helpful, but if you’re like me a lot of the technical information goes over your head. You can feel helpless.
So it’s good to have a host that provides good service and that can take action when things are bad. And if you’re not getting that it’s important to move on.
Because like I said, if the site isn’t working you’re missing out on new clients.
Hosting Is Important Even For Small Businesses
GBW doesn’t get high traffic numbers compared to a lot of websites. News sites, for example, get millions of views. GBW probably won’t ever be in that realm.
GBW isn’t even in the same area as some of my other blogs that get much more traffic. But GBW gets a good amount of targeted traffic from our target clients.
We look at the questions they’re asking in relation to their job and try to answer those with the blog posts. And over time that seems to help build the authority of the entire site so the main pages like the homepage start ranking for relevant general terms.
But when the site goes down and you lose even the little bit of traffic you have or if the site is slow and it’s a bad experience for visitors you lose potential clients.
And for a small business that’s crucial.
So investing in good hosting is well worth it maybe even more so for small businesses.
Even if you have to invest hundreds or thousands on hosting it’s worth it to have the best uptime, the fastest speed and the best support possible.
Because if you’re like me, you’re a business owner or whatever and the server stuff goes over your head.
Final Thought
Once things get settled maybe I’ll have to go back and look at how the hosting issues affected GBW the last couple weeks. I’m interested in seeing how the traffic was affected and maybe even the inquiries.
And hopefully things go alright with the new host. There are always a few hiccups, but you hope that you’re making the right choices when moving forward.