Regardless of the purpose of your company website, the quality of the user experience (UX) can be an important indicator of how well the website fulfills its purpose.
Even a single indicator such as the loading speed or security of a website can completely change the conversion rate.
For this reason, UX is often seen as the domain of designers, but in reality, no business owner can afford to ignore it - and your web hosting can have a huge impact on the visitor experience on your website.
In this post, we'll take a closer look at some of the key ways that reliable web hosting can impact your UX and how you can apply this knowledge to provide a positive experience for your customers.
What is web hosting?
Your website is a collection of pages saved in HTML format. It requires a domain (address) and hosting (server) in order to be published on the Internet.
With web hosting, an external company provides servers on which websites and associated files are stored, accessed by Internet users and centrally managed. The web hosting provider you choose manages and maintains its servers, ensuring that your content is available to all visitors to your website around the clock.
How does web hosting affect the UX?
1. website speed
One of the most obvious aspects of the relationship between web hosting and user experience is website speed.
Website speed has always been an important criterion in UX optimization because it affects the way users of all kinds perceive your website. You can have an attractive website with high-quality content, but a slow speed is enough to make it unusable. Many users don't wait long enough to even try it out!
Slow speeds on checkout or other conversion pages can cost you sales directly. Data collected by Cloudflare shows that websites that load in 2.4 seconds have an average conversion rate of 1.9 %. If the loading time is increased to 4.2 seconds, the average conversion rate is almost halved.
When someone is trying to make a purchase or solve a problem, every extra second can affect their commitment to the task and their trust in your website.
If you're concerned about the speed of your pages or your website in general, you should look into how your hosting provider can help you with this. It's also important that anyone managing your site's content understands how certain elements can affect the speed your users experience.
Look for a web hosting solution that uses a cloud-based server instead of a shared model.
Make sure that no outdated storage systems such as hard disk drives (HDD) are used instead of solid-state drives (SSD).
- SSD uses flash memory for data storage and offers faster read/write speeds and shorter loading times for websites.
- This makes SSD more reliable and secure than conventional web hosting solutions.
- It helps you to minimize loading times to have a positive experience when accessing pages and content.
Many modern hosting providers, especially WordPress cloud hosting providers (such as WP Engine, Flywheel and 20i), also have caching pre-installed and configured.
- Caching stores frequently accessed data or files in order to improve performance by reducing the loading time for this data.
- This enables more efficient data transfer and faster provision of content for visitors to your website.
By carefully considering your hosting options and making sure you only choose hosting providers that prioritize loading speed, you'll have a solid foundation for your UX - and your website can keep up with the competition.
2. safety
There are many different variables that can affect the security of a website, including the hosting of the website. And any business website that stores customer data of any kind, from simple names and email addresses to credit card numbers and birthdays, needs to make security a top priority.
A hosting provider's ability to provide backups, network monitoring, encryption and other security initiatives can save your website visitors from negative experiences, such as visiting a hacked website or, worse, having their data stolen.
You don't want to be the company that has to contact your customers to tell them that their data has been compromised.
If you opt for managed web hosting, you don't have to worry so much about the security of your server. Here are some important points you should bear in mind
- Experience and references of the management team: Anyone with a reseller account can establish themselves as a hosting provider. However, a hosting management team with proven experience and credentials in providing web services can be a good indicator of a proactive approach to your security.
- Existence of a detailed recovery plan: When looking for new hosting providers, sales reps should be able to create a recovery plan in the event of a cyber-attack or other unforeseen disaster.
- How has the supplier reacted to attacks in the past? Learning about past security incidents and how hosting providers have responded will give you an idea of what kind of protection you can expect as a customer.
- Security guidelines: The policies that govern your hosting provider's security approach should be accessible to you from the first point of contact. If your hosting provider can easily share this information with you, you can be sure that your website's UX is supported by a range of preventative and reactive security measures.
3. availability
Another factor that seems obvious: if your website is down, it's one of the worst experiences a potential customer or client can have.
It's important to find a web hosting service that ensures your website is available 24/7 and has a reliable caching system that prevents downtime due to high traffic or demanding high-speed themes.
There are many reasons why a website can fail:
- After the start, the server can no longer handle the data traffic at once.
- DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service)
- Problems with the server (for this reason we do not recommend a dedicated server)
- Problems with your account
The availability of a website depends directly on the quality of the web hosting.
Even though downtime is rare, it can cost any business dearly. Data from Queue-it, a virtual waiting room provider, shows that downtime costs 91 % of businesses around USD 300,000 per hour, with this figure being even higher for popular shopping sites.
Not only does downtime mean that your audience can't access your content, but it can also have a detrimental effect on your search engine ranking:
- An outage of a few hours can cause many users to return from your website to the search results, which sends Google negative signals about your website (and these users are unlikely to return).
- An outage of one or more days can result in Google trying to crawl and index your website during this time, but not finding it and eventually de-indexing it completely.
- After deindexing, it is very difficult to restore the previous ranking and it can take a year or longer.
It's worth looking for a managed hosting service that includes real-time monitoring or, for unmanaged hosting, setting up a tool like Uptimerobot. This will ensure that you are notified as quickly as possible in the event of an outage and can respond accordingly.
4. location of the server
If you're a brand that serves a global audience, the location of your host's servers is another variable that can have a big impact on your user experience.
A greater distance between the servers and your users can increase data latency, resulting in slower loading pages, a poorer user experience and lower engagement.
Although server locations have been a real challenge for UX optimization in the past, many modern cloud hosting providers use data centers that are spread across multiple global locations. When a web user requests access to a website, the provider routes the request to the server that is most appropriate based on the user's geographic location.
In addition, cloud providers implement redundancy and failover mechanisms so that in the event of problems at one server location, data traffic is automatically redirected to another location to ensure a consistent service.
When choosing a hosting provider, find out about the service's server locations and consider how this will affect the user experience for your current and future audience.
5. accessibility of plugins
If you have experience building websites, you know how important plugins can be in providing the kind of user experience your audience is looking for.
Plugins add additional functions to WordPress websites. They offer a wide range of possible uses, from adding simple elements such as a table of contents to interactive SEO recommendations and important website security functions.
While plugins that enable simple website functions are generally offered by all hosting providers, some providers keep lists of unauthorized plugins for more sophisticated functions such as SMTP or FTP.
When choosing your hosting provider, it's important to consider what kind of plugins your website needs for optimal usability, especially if your website is still in the development phase. While limited access to plugins may be sufficient for your needs right now, you may want to expand the functionality of your website with additional plugins as your business grows.
It's important that your hosting provider is able to meet the needs of your audience and your business and help you create a positive user experience that reflects your vision and goals.
Reliable hosting for long-term success
The key to success lies in maintaining a highly usable website. A good hosting provider will give you the hidden basics you need to ensure your visitors have a positive experience every time they visit.
Understanding the role web hosting plays in delivering a fast, reliable and secure website will make it easier for you to find the right web host and create a website that really appeals to your audience.
