Trends in the Web Hosting Industry – It’s All About Website Speed
Web Hosting Industry Trends To Consider in 2022
The web hosting industry is ripe with opportunities, but it can be difficult to navigate the complexities of web hosting. As your needs change, so do your needs for technology and services that will help you stand out in the dynamic marketplace. The size of your business, as well as what technologies are most important to you, will change over time. To stay current and up-to-date with trends in the industry, there are some Web Hosting Industry Trends you should be aware of in 2022. Improving the website speed must be your prior task before going further.
As the Web Hosting Industry gains momentum, it is critical to stay current with industry trends as well as what your market expects from you. These industry trends are some of the most important that should be at the forefront of your mind in 2022.
When developing our first website, we want to build a visually appealing page that has all of the features that our visitors may want. While these are all important considerations, there is one more that demands your complete attention: site speed.
As online competition heats up, companies must differentiate themselves by offering something truly distinctive. However, no one will be able to view it if your sites take an eternity to load.
It’s actually pretty simple: when options expand, customers naturally expect more for their money.
The Current Predicament of Web Hosting
There are over 2 billion websites online as of January 2021, and this only includes active ones. These web projects are hosted by over 330,000 registered hosting providers, who ensure their seamless performance, uptime, connection, and security.
When it comes to the many types of web hosting, the clients are becoming more evenly distributed throughout the niches:
- Shared Hosting – 32%
- Dedicated Hosting – 28%
- VPS Hosting – 11%
- Reseller Hosting – 13%
- Colocation & Others – 16%
Remember that this information is from 2018, and a lot has changed since then. Cloud and VPS services have risen in popularity, so any service you select will be a delight.
So, how does speed into the picture?
According to recent research on the main variables prospective clients evaluate when selecting a hosting service, speed routinely ranks among the top three options. There are several compelling reasons for this…
Why Is Website Speed Important?
People sometimes want to pack all of their ideas into one perfect-looking homepage when creating the website of their dreams, which is entirely natural. However, they frequently lose sight of how this affects their site speed and end up with projects that perform poorly.
Many advantages come from optimizing your websites for optimal speed:
1. Superb First Impression
When someone learns about your brand and enters your website, you just have a few seconds to catch their interest and entice them to learn more. You’ve already wasted those crucial seconds if you spend them with a slow page load.
It’s as easy as that.
2. Maintaining User Consistency
The days of waiting a few minutes for an image file or a website page to load are long gone. We want everything and we want it now in our consumer world (well, yesterday if possible).
As evidence of this notion, the average visitor expects a page to load in no more than 3-5 seconds. They will then simply close the page and forget about it. This is especially true for online customers, with 79% saying they will never return to an ecommerce website that appears to have performance issues.
3. Improved Google Rankings
While Google like to keep things under wraps, company representatives have frequently said that website performance is one of the most critical criteria in their search ranking algorithms. And there are almost 200 of them.
From the perspective of a user, the results on Google’s Page 1 are frequently sufficient to answer their inquiry. You DESIRE to get there. But it would be difficult if your website was too slow. While your real content is as vital, if your pages are slow, no one will see it.
4. Increased Sales Conversions
Let’s perform some fast math. People abandon websites that take more than three seconds to load. If you have 10,000 visitors every month, almost 4,000 of them will leave inside the first few seconds. In a for-profit firm, such a waste of potential cash might easily destroy your project before it really begins.
5. Increasing Brand Reputation
When you observe a business owner taking good care of their website, you may assume they do the same for their customers. It’s actually just basic psychology. And people are not mistaken; a speedy and well-designed website typically delivers a decent reflection of what you may anticipate from the service.
How to Test the Website Speed?
Fortunately for webmasters, there are several tools available to assist you measure the speed of your website. Many of them are free and online, with the primary differences being the number of server locations and report data.
When testing your site’s performance, it’s always preferable to do many tests with a variety of tools. You’ll eliminate false positives and obtain a better sense of your page’s performance this way.
Here are a few public top picks:
GTMetrix – Select one of seven server locations to receive extensive insights on your page performance and what you can do to enhance it. Tests may be conducted in both Chrome and Firefox.
Pingdom – you have 7 server locations spread over 5 continents. In-depth statistics are nicely organized into sections and color codes.
WebPageTest – has 37 server sites across six continents. There are several possibilities for testing across various browsers and mobile environments.
What Affects the Speed of Your Website?
Now that we’ve discussed the significance of lightning-fast pages and how to quantify them, the next step is to actively pursue their improvement. While there are several ways to speed up your website, you may focus on three important areas.
Page Weight/Size – Every element on your page has weight, including themes, plugins, and photos. As much as we want to cram a ton of HD images and sophisticated functions, we must keep in mind that each one will increase the load on your server. Examine your current speed statistics to see which aspects are causing the most delays. Make their optimization your first focus.
Server Location – If your supplier has a high-connectivity network and trustworthy data center providers, the location of your server is unimportant. Still, assuming all other variables are equal, simple logic says that the closer your hosting servers are to your visitors, the faster your website will load.
Hosting Plan – This is where a dependable hosting service may make a significant impact. VPS and Cloud platforms are becoming more economical, and such plans may readily support even high-traffic websites. Starting with the hardware and software configuration, your host may reduce the server’s latency and balance its load for always-smooth performance.
VPS and Cloud services are especially designed for speed, and you frequently have the option of using a Managed VPS or an Unmanaged VPS platform. Prices have already decreased to the point that companies such as HostingSeekers can provide VPS services for less than $10 per month.
Final Thoughts
After reading this article, maybe you’ll never overlook the significance of website speed again. Building a visually stunning website should always be a priority, but when combined with remarkable performance and UX, you’re already on the right track. You may also follow some web hosting industry trends to get better results.