If you are planning a wordpress web site, you want to make sure that you have taken into account one of the most important items – the hosting. It matters, both for your site visitors, and for SEO. It also matters to your developer/website manager or team.
Speed Matters for Consumers
You really want a fast site because it frustrates your consumers. Numerous studies show that a slow website will have an effect on the time a site visitor spends on your site, and it’s even more important if you have an ecommerce site, as studies have also correlated the speed with sales.
Hosting Speed Matters for SEO
You might not have considered speed for SEO, but I have seen first-hand that improving your site speed really does improve many metrics on your site. I like to compare total visits, time on site, and repeat visits when evaluating quality of site traffic – easily done by installing Google Analytics.
Siteground has several tools available to assist you in tuning your site for speed, or it’s something SEM by Design can help you with. Siteground makes it easy with things like a CDN and some native plugins to compress your images to a managable size for serving on a website, all without sacrificing quality.
Hosting Speed Matters for Development and Maintenance
Believe it or not, I have worked on sites that are so slow on the back end that it takes what seems like an eternity to get anything at all done. Editors and pages load so slow that you spend a long time waiting just to make simple updates to your site. It doesn’t matter if you are paying someone or doing it yourself – time is money, and if you don’t have something that works, it’ll end up costing you in the long run.
HTTPS and Other Hosting Considerations
From a trust standpoint, make sure there’s the option to utilize the HTTPS or secure protocol when selecting your host. From a consumer trust standpoint this is essential, but also from an organic SEO standpoint, I feel it’s pretty much a requirement these days.
I would strongly recommend Siteground as a solid, yet low-cost hosting plan that will definitely give you an edge when it comes to setting up your site hosting. It’s really the first step in the site development process and should be your first priority.
Feel free to contact me if you need help with the process, I’ll even get you started with free setup of the HTTPS protocol if you make the Siteground purchase here.