Using Hosting to Improve Your Conversions

Getting traffic for your website is hard enough. Making that traffic convert can be a nightmare if you aren’t doing the right things. Most business owners just concentrate on the normal things: a good website design, compelling copy, fair prices and a great product selection. All of these things are certainly important, and they will help carry you into the black.

However, one thing that many people don’t think about is hosting. Yes, your host is very important to your ability convert visitors. While a good host will put you on fair ground with your competitors, a bad host will shrink your conversions to nearly zero. Here are a few things that you need to consider when choosing a host if you want to make the most money.

SEE ALSO: 7 Small But Effective Search Engines You Must Know

Image Credit: B.Garry

Loading Speed
Everyone is offering cheap hosting. However, the problem is that most of these hosts are cramming as many websites as they can on one server, which is significantly lowering the loading speed for each website. Poor loading speed kills your conversions.

Think about this for a second: if your website takes a tenth of a second longer than your competitor’s to load, then you’ll lose 1% of sales. That’s for every tenth of a second. Your website should load in three seconds or less. If it’s longer than this, then you either need to make your website lighter or change hosts.

At the same token, you can often increase sales by improving your loading speeds. A slow website is considered dead or technologically inept, but a fast website is advanced and superior for customers. Do your best to find the fastest hosting within your budget.

Security and Protection
You are asking customers for a lot of information when they are shopping online. Normally someone just has to swipe their credit card through a machine if they are shopping at a physical store. If they are shopping online, then they have to manually enter the numbers. This makes a difference in their minds, and they want to know that they are safe.

You can improve conversions by offering this safety to ease their minds. Everyone is afraid of hackers stealing their credit card numbers and identity, so you must broadcast that you understand these concerns and that you are doing your best to alleviate them.

This is fairly easy to do with any quality ecommerce or business host. Just buy an SSL certificate and encryption so that people feel safe buying from you. You might also want to ensure that the host offers an HTTPS version of your website for more security.

Great Uptime
Your standard host will offer 99% guaranteed uptime, which is actually really good. However, this means that your website will be done for a few days throughout the year, which can hurt sales. While 99% is the standard, you should consider using a host with better guaranteed uptime.
Regardless of what you find, 100% guaranteed uptime is almost impossible. Some hosts promise this, but you’ll find that they are often exaggerating. However, you can easily find 99.9% and 99.99% without a significant increase in cost.

If you want the best uptime, then look for hosts with 99.9999% or 99.99999% uptime. Your website will only be down for a few seconds throughout the year. This matters because people may not visit your website again if they catch it being down.

Mobile Friendly
People are using their mobile devices more often to buy from websites. While you can easily build and attach a mobile website to your server, you should also ensure that your host works well with mobile devices.

Many analysts are saying that by 2014 or 2016, mobile devices will be more popular than desktop and laptops. Considering the current trends, this seems plausible. You must get yourself ready now for this change in technology. Failing to do this will hurt your sales.

When you add the mobile site, use it briefly to ensure that it loads properly without any bugs or problems. Also, talk to your host and ask them about how well they serve mobile devices.

Conclusion
Your host is one of the most important parts when it comes to increasing your online conversions. Not only will the host help you easily serve customers, but you can trump your competitors by offering a superior service, which always improves conversions.