When choosing a hosting service, most people do not consider the server speed and how it could affect their business. While you might turn a blind eye to how fast your page is able to load, it has been found without having to spend a penny more, by just having a higher server speed, you can be able to attain better business and drive your profits up. this is why a growing number of people and more so those that are in the eCommerce line of business are starting to move around and joining hosting services that offer higher server speed.

So how does server speed become a vital tool in increasing your revenues?

A slow loading website reflects low revenue

In most cases, websites that load slowly have been known to have higher bounce rates and tend to have lower sales with poorer performance. A number of studies have proven that on average, a great deal of customers and clients tend to leave and seek for services elsewhere when the website does not become accessible in less than 6 seconds. Hence if your website does not load within the given time, chances are you are losing plenty of your business to your competitors.

A slow website affects your rankings

There are thousands of things that search engines consider when ranking pages and every time you make sure that you meet on of these factors, you get much closer to getting the edge on your competition. One of the factors that the primary players like Google use is the loading speed of a website. By having a better loading speed you have better rankings and this translates to better viewership and certainly better traffic which is what you are looking for.

Faster website means better visitor experience

One of the best ways to ensure that your business flourishes is by having return clients. This is highly dictated by the experience that the clients get on their first visit. Part of this experience will be facilitated by how fast the website loads. If it is fast enough, you will have more clients coming back and that will mean more business for you.

Now that you understand how the site speed can affect the kind of business that you get, just how fast is fast enough for your website? How long should it ideally take for your website to load?

Ideally, the best loading time for a website is around under 3 seconds. If it is able to load under this time, the website is considered to be good, if it is able to load in under 5 seconds, then it is considered to be fair. However, if it is anywhere around or close to 10 seconds, then you can rest assured that you are not fairing very well speed wise.

To make sure that you do not continue suffering from the same consequence of low speed, you have to take time to make sure that you take steps to make sure that you are able to bump up the speed of your website. Some of the things that you can do to make sure that you have better speeds include;

Opting for a dedicated server

This is the best option you can have to improve the speeds of your website. The reason as to why you should opt for this as soon as you can afford it is because it does not reduce the quality of your coding and comes with a variety of other advantages that include better security for your site as well as the ability to handle larger traffic. However, the dedicated server can be quite costly to maintain and you have to have the financial muscle to make sure you can afford this. If you are not in a position to afford the dedicated server, there are a number of other options that you can use to cut back on the loading time.

Decrease your code size

First you have to optimize your content and reduce the space that has been taken by this. To do this, start by removing the unnecessary whitespaces, old comments and any empty elements. This will free up sufficient space for you to note an improvement. If you find this quite complex, you can use a variety of tools that are easily available online.

Optimize the images

Still on freeing up more space, reduce the size of the images that you have on the website as much as you can. Additionally, try to make sure that you use images that are in the JPEG format. Also check for the unnecessary comments and colors which can enlarge the size of the image even further.

Having a reliable loading speed can mean a lot for your online business. As much as how fast your website loads might look quite mediocre, it can have serious implications on the amount of business that you get. Which is why you can never leave anything to chance.