Guest post by Riya Sander.
Running a small business often means having a busy web server. In today’s digital world, a website is one of the most important components of a small business marketing plan. For a growing number of companies from SaaS developers to ecommerce to content providers, their website is the small business. Running on different types of servers can mean varied results in speed, giving you different site speed and user experience at different times.
It can also leave you paying premium hosting fees during your business downtime, such as the wee early morning hours. Unless your business is online 24 hours a day and running in different time zones, you may not be getting the most out of premium web hosting rates.
What is a small business owner to do? To increase overall website conversion rate, analyze your landing pages and the conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools and best practices being used on the site. Choosing between the seemingly endless list of optimization options and deciding which areas to focus on and choices to make for your business can be difficult.
One of the most important decisions that you might make for your website conversion rate, however, is the choice between server hosts. Compare shared, dedicated and VPS hosting, for example. These types of server hosting can provide very different results, depending on your speeds and premiums.
Buying Dedicated, Shared Hosting Versus VPS Hosting
Server hosting is one of the most important, and potentially expensive, decisions that small business owners can make about their online presence. A dedicated server is easily one of the best choices you can make for site speed and privacy. If you manage lots of data on your website, you may want to choose this option. You can get large amounts of data transfer and speed with this type of account. You can optimize servers with dedicated service and attention, and if you have a large number of website pages this is one of the best ways to increase site speed.
VPS, or virtual private hosting, gives you virtual hosting on someone else’s server via the Internet. You will often pay a lower cost for this type of service, but you may have fewer security features. If you store any financial or customer data on your site, this may leave you more vulnerable than you would be with a dedicated server.
Optimizing Website Code for Speed
Perhaps a lesser known way to optimize your website conversion rates with better speeds is to edit code on your website. Whether you use JavaScript, Ruby, Python, or another coding system to customize your website, keeping code clean is by far one of the most important things you can do to keep your website working at its fastest rate.
A few things you can do are to make sure you are running on the most recent version of your code languages, update to HTML5 or HTML6, and check your code against current algorithms. The updates here keep your website compatible with the fastest versions of web browsers and help your site stay mobile friendly. In addition, you can choose to standardize your code with website templates and a hosting site that hosts those templates also. This can be a great way to get some help with automatic updates to your website widgets and other accessories. It can also be a great way to manage stored data.
Optimizing Mobile Pages for Conversion
With the increase of mobile Internet use and the broad adoption of smartphones and tablets, one of the best things you can do to increase website conversion for your small business is to make sure it is mobile friendly. Keep in mind that page loading time on mobile is also an issue, and update your code as needed to make sure that your pages load quickly on a phone.
Mobile friendly updates for websites include brighter on-screen colors and simpler graphics. You may find that you will even need a different font for your mobile website. Check that your site is visible in different visibility conditions for mobile, and consider speeding up load times by reducing flash and other motion graphics for mobile. Most importantly, make sure that your page is navigable on a mobile phone. Buttons and graphics that are too small or too close together will make this harder on the user.
Mobile pages can benefit from intense user testing and user interface (UI) updates. To get the most out of your mobile pages for conversion, work with a UI or User Interaction designer who tests often using conversion testing software. Like everything else, mobile page interaction has trends. A designer who uses testing software will help keep your page looking fresh and give you data to work with, so you don’t have to guess about where to go next with your site.
Bottom Line
Perhaps one of the most important choices you can make for your website is your website host. Separate from your operating system, web hosts vary in speed and quality. Some sites allow custom code changes and run various programs custom like Apache or Python, and some don’t run them very well, or they may be on an older version. You will want to shop around to find out how fast you can get your website performing based on internet hosting speeds and program running time.
Server hosting, code optimization, and web hosting are just a few of the things that will make your website run efficiently and enable you to run a customized, high-converting website. They are among the most important factors in both website speed and maintenance, along with search engine optimization (SEO) skill. You can learn more about code updates and SEO best practices by reading blogs, attending webinars and live conferences, and talking to experts. There is a wealth of information on updates to HTML and languages like Ruby available in order to help you customize your website.
About the author: Riya Sander is an inspired writer, passionate about traveling, lifestyle and encouraging startups. She understands the importance of productivity at work and never stopped finding new ways to create her work productivity. At the moment, she is a content marketing strategist for VPS HiSpeed, a virtual server company hosted in Thailand. Connect with Riya on Twitter. Gravatar
Being online means to have SEO friendly website and be on top ranking to get high conversations. You have explained so well how optimizing website can help to boost ranking and gain high traffic. Having speed for website can decrease bounce rate. I am obliged for this astonishing article, it is great help to understand importance of hosting sped and landing page.
Thanks! Glad this post was helpful.