Regardless of the kind of website that you run it is important to constantly check and tweak it on a regular basis. It is the only way for you to keep pace with and ultimately beat the competition.
As your business grows, you need your website to evolve and meet the changing needs of your growing customer base. You need to regularly update the design of your website, review the contents and track how well it is ranking, but you also need to look at your hosting on a regular basis.
Why audit your hosting?
Auditing your hosting is important because it ensures you pick up potential issues early, meaning that you can take action before these problems have an adverse impact on your business. Customers and search engines do not like websites that are slow to load or are frequently down.
Slow sites are always bad news
Most search engines now penalise slow websites. In addition, customers tend to navigate away from these sites and go elsewhere. A slow website can lose you potential clients and push you down the rankings.
Unavailable websites are damaging
The same is true if your website is down and unavailable on a regular basis. If a customer goes to your website and finds it down the chances of them coming back ever again are very low, which means that you could lose that customer permanently.
Search engines also do not like it when a website is down and cannot be crawled. For them this is an indication of an unreliable firm.
Any new content that you have loaded cannot be checked and indexed, which means that pages about your latest products and news will take longer to be found. This can be bad for sales and slow down growth.
Bandwidth
As your business grows so will your website. This means that you have to think about the amount of space the files and images on your site are taking up. You need to check how much space or bandwidth is left and do so on a regular basis.
What to do if you find issues
If you find out that your site is taking too long to load, is down on a regular basis or running low on space it is time to upgrade your hosting. Rather than simply swapping companies first talk to your host and see if they can solve the problem. It is much easier than having to move your website to a new hosting company.
It is also worth considering upgrading to VPS server hosting. This kind of hosting gives you more dedicated space and better control.
Having more space not only means that you have enough room for more pages and images it can help your site to load faster. The good thing about VPS hosting is that you get a section of the server to yourself. You no longer have to share that space with other websites, which helps to ensure that your website suffers from less downtime.
If you do decide to change your hosting you need thoroughly check your site. Make sure that your entire site has been moved across and that everything is working as it should be.
