How serious are you about the success of your website or blog as a business development tool?
The majority of small business owners I speak with, claim they are serious about the marketing value of their sites, but then they place their sites on cheap hosting plans.
Here’s why this matters: Google now punishes slow sites with lower search rankings!
Google has announced that as of last month, your site will be penalised if it doesn’t load nice and quickly! That’s right, if your site loads slowly, it will now receive a lower search ranking from Google, than a site that loads quickly. This makes the true cost of using cheap web hosting providers a lot easier for people to see.
The true cost of cheap web hosting plans
Long before Google’s shock announcement, cheap web hosting plans were a really bad idea for commercial sites. That’s because no matter how nice your site looks or how good the SEO is, if it loads too slowly, people will NOT hang around and wait. Internet users get really frustrated at having to hang around for pages to load on slow websites. This is definitely not the frame of mind we want people in, if we are about to give them an insight into our business.
Why are so many small business sites so frustratingly slow?
I used to believe it was because the site owners didn’t think it mattered; that cheap web hosting was just an ill-advised, cost saving measure. However, this is certainly not always the case! In many instances, the site owner has no idea how unreliable or slow their site is, because they visit it too infrequently to notice.
Bloggers, for instance, who only blog a few times a month, will often only visit their blog when posting or responding to comments. As a result, they miss well over 99% of their sites performance. The same is true for business owners, who have websites, which are not regularly updated. These sites too can be down or too slow to respond for extended periods, again, without the site owner even knowing. I strongly advise you check out your site regularly and at different times of the day, so you get a more accurate picture of what your prospective customers or clients see.
QUICK TIP
Don’t fall for the “we promise 99% up-time” claims of low end web hosts. In web hosting, 99% is a very poor service. This actually means that they expect your site to be down for 1 full working day every month or down for 3 full working days, every 100 days! What is that worth to you, in lost business, lost enquiries, lost sales?
The bottom line: If you have a commercial site, get it on the most reliable web hosting package you can.
IMPORTANT: If you want to make more sales, boost your profits and grow an amazing business, this will help you!