Site speed is one of the most important factors in getting ranked in Google. If your site is slow it will have a direct impact on your rankings.
If your site isn’t as quick as you think it should be, we can improve your site speed with managed hosting.
We know that trying to improve a WordPress site that lives on poor hosting is like walking through treacle – it’s hard work and you don’t really get anywhere.
If you’ve gone to a lot of effort in designing a new WordPress site or have inherited a live site it can be incredibly frustrating to see it score poorly in tests – a lot of the issues could be fixed with better hosting.
Talk to Toast Today about your hosting requirements
Why don’t you host your site yourself?
To be perfectly honest, you can, relatively easy, manage your own hosting. Most hosting accounts now provide control panels and various other tools to allow you control of your hosting environment.
However, if you’re not experienced in using FTP, phpMyAdmin, Control panels and other server management tools, we think it’s still best left to the professionals – it’s easy to burn hours of time (or do some real damage) if you don’t know what you’re doing.
There’s much more to managing and improving your site speed than just your server settings.
With hosting, you get what you pay for
Many sites we look after sit quite happily on shared hosting accounts (shared hosting is where lots of different websites live on the same server).
For smaller websites, those that are not mission critical or get little traffic, shared hosting provides a more affordable hosting environment, but it still needs looking after.
For larger and mission-critical sites, we recommend dedicated WordPress server.
Check your site speed
There are some free tools that you can use to test your site. These include Pingdom for speedtests and Byte Check for server responsiveness. It should be noted that these are guides and need to be interpreted – there are many discussions around Time to first byte (TTFB) and how much it matters.
Pingdom however, will give you a waterfall report on your site and show you where any hold-ups are – it’s a good place to start looking for issues.
Performance can also change over time – you need to keep on top of it.
It might not be your hosting that’s at fault
No matter how fast your hosting is, if your site isn’t built properly then it’s going to be difficult to get that load time down to under a second.
Lots of plugins and scripts, large images and many other factors can mean your server is being asked to do the impossible.
We see it as part of the our hosting setup to check your site for such issues – it’s all part of the managed hosting service.
We can also measure and track server utilisation to see if or where your site is over-using resources that may in turn have a detrimental effect on it. Sometimes plugins can cause issues and errors on the server that can slow your site down.
We offer free site audits that can show you where your site might be at fault.
If you want to improve your site, talk to us about managed hosting
If you’re serious about winning new customers via your website, you need to take your hosting seriously. Spending time and money on a new website to then host it on a £3 per month plan doesn’t make any sense.
Our hosting plans are affordable and effective.
Consider this.
Most people would argue that a mobile phone is now an essential part of their business toolkit.
A typical phone contract is around £40-£50 per month.
Given that your website works for your business 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, affording your hosting the same level of investment seems an absolute no-brainer – but we still come across mission-critial website that underperform on budget hosting accounts.
If your website is huge, has a WooCommerce store or other process-heavy plugins, then you may need to consider twice this or more to get the site working on hosting it deserves.
If you’d like to talk about your hosting, have us examine your current set up or to get a free site audit, give us a call on 01295 266644 or click below to send us a message.
