In recent years, many experts have emphasized the importance of having fast-loading websites (like the study done by Kissmetrics). The website load time directly impacts the user’s perception of your brand. Also, a slow loading site loses some valuable page ranks in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) too (Google Blog). Therefore, it is safe to say that a slow-loading website is not something that any site owner should settle with.
Do you know how long does your website take to load completely? If your answer is negative, then we would recommend that you stop reading this article right now and test your website’s speed by using tools like Google’s Page Speed Insights, Pingdom, Uptime Robot, Monitis, etc.
There are many ways to improve the speed of your website. In today’s article, we will talk about how hosting affects the website load time and the reasons why VPS Hosting services help speed up your site.
How web hosting affects website load time?
When a user loads a web page, the web server does a lot of processing. It executes code, runs queries on the database, etc. Therefore, if the web server is powerful, then these processes are executed faster resulting in a fast-loading website. Remember, the web server is where your website resides. Hence, the performance of the site depends on that of the server. Therefore, choosing the right hosting type is essential for improving the loading time of your site.
VPS Hosting and Website Load Times
In VPS Hosting or Virtual Private Server Hosting, your website is hosted on a virtual server. The hosting provider uses virtualization to divide the physical web server into several virtual servers. Each of these has dedicated resources like CPU, RAM, etc. and is isolated from the other virtual servers. Further, VPS Hosting plans offer complete root access to you which allows you to tweak its settings for optimum performance.
As compared to Shared Hosting plans, VPS Hosting certainly offers better site speed and performance of the website. While Dedicated Servers can offer faster sites, the costs involved are considerably higher. This makes VPS Hosting plans one of the most cost-efficient plans for fast-loading websites.
Apart from choosing the right hosting plans, here are some tips that can help you improve the loading time of your site:
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Leverage in-browser caching
- Ensure that there are no broken links on your website
- Optimize the images on your site for speed
- Minimize the 301 redirects
- Enable Gzip compression
- Minify the JS and CSS files
- Avoid hotlinking of images
Summing Up
The loading speed of a website depends on a lot of factors. Therefore, you need to ensure that you work on all of them to offer a blazing fast website to your customers. After all, your brand’s image depends upon how the user feels after visiting your website. Also, a fast website would mean a higher page rank and better visibility – leave no stone unturned!
