We’ve said it before: your website is like a digital storefront. If it’s slow, unreliable, or constantly crashing, it’s much like visiting a physical store which has flickering lights and a broken front door. It’s not exactly going to encourage you to part with your hard-earned money.
If your WordPress site isn’t performing like it should, your web hosting might be to blame. In this blog, we’re giving you a quick rundown of some red flags that may indicate when to upgrade your hosting plan.
If you’ve got no idea how to pick out a web host, then check out the article we’ve written on that previously.
When to upgrade your web hosting: the signs to look for
1. Slow website speeds
We’re sure you’ve visited a website that took forever to load. Isn’t it irritating?! Well, if your site is slow, then your visitors feel the same. We can’t count the number of times we’ve visited a site so slow we’ve given up and gone elsewhere. If your site takes more than a few seconds to load, you WILL be losing visitors. This might be because your hosting plan doesn’t have the resources to keep up. (Other solutions should be explored first – we will write more about this later.)
2. Frequent downtime
If your site is often down, even for short periods, that’s a red flag. Downtime means lost visitors, missed sales, and a less trustworthy site in the eyes of your audience. Think of it this way: would you want to take the time to visit a shop if you can’t count on it being open?
We have just this problem in our village – our local post office doesn’t keep regular hours. It’s nearly impossible to know when it’s actually going to be open. It’s supposed to be 9am to 5pm, seven days a week. But actually it’s open whenever they feel like it, so it’s a common occurrence to try and use it… And just find it shut. As a small business, we find this incredibly frustrating. If your site is like our local post office, your potential clients will also be annoyed – and they’ll go elsewhere (as we’ve had to, with the damn post office).
3. Traffic growth
As your site becomes more popular, you need a hosting plan that can handle more visitors. This is why it’s so important to keep an eye on your traffic – Google Analytics is a great, free, tool to help you do this.* As more people visit your (hopefully) sleek and snazzy site because of all that (incredible) marketing you do, more strain will be put on your host. If you notice traffic spikes causing slowdowns, it might be a sign that it’s time to upgrade your web hosting and scale!
If your ultimate goal is to have a website that’s attracting 500 people a day, you need to plan for that. The cheap and cheerful web hosting package many people start out with won’t be man enough for those kinds of numbers.
*If you want to know more about Google Analytics, check out our previous blog articles. We’ve written about it a fair bit. We can also help you add it to an existing site.
4. Security issues
This is a trickier point to make, and it’s hard to talk about it in broad strokes. But we always recommend you do a little bit of digging on how seriously your hosting provider takes security. A hacked site is a nightmare. If your hosting doesn’t provide robust security features to cover all the basics, you’re putting your business at risk.
Things like:
- A history of server upgrades and patching
- DDoS mitigation
- They’re upfront about data centre location
- They’re upfront about their security compliance and best practices
…Are all good indicators that a host takes security seriously.
This is a massive subject in and of itself, so we’re going to revisit this in more detail in a future blog article.
5. Limited resources
Are you constantly running out of storage or hitting bandwidth limits? This can be a key indicator for when to upgrade your web hosting.
Upgrading can give you the space and speed you need. Normally you’ll get an overview of your storage utilisation and bandwidth usage on your hosting control panel. You should always keep an eye on things like storage – if you use your available space, your site may stop working entirely. There’s a techy reason for this we wont go into right now, but it’s extremely important to have a bit of space to play with.
This is another reason to think about the end goal of your site – if you want to have videos, images, and articles coming out the wazoo then you need to bear that in mind from the get-go. More videos, images, and articles, means you’re taking up more space on your web host. You’ll hit the limit eventually; and if you combine that with high visitor numbers… Well, that’s a recipe for disaster (and downtime).
What happens if you don’t upgrade?
So, even though we’ve just given you a whole host of red flags to look for – what if you still don’t see the point? Maybe you think that we’re trying to sell you something you don’t need (that’s really not the kind of thing that we do, but we get that there are a lot of snake-oil sales people out there!) Well, let’s cut all that gumph down and put it really simply – if you are outgrowing your web host then you’ll start seeing the following in no time:
- Frustrated visitors: Slow or unavailable websites drive people away. So your visitor numbers will drop.
- Lost sales: E-commerce sites can lose customers who don’t want to wait. So your sales will decrease.
- SEO impact: Google ranks slower websites lower, so you won’t show in search results as well as you have previously.
- Bad reviews: Particularly angry and vindictive visitors may take to reviewing your site or business poorly. If you’ve totally missed the viral bad-review campaigns that have happened to some poor businesses… Well, count yourself lucky. It’s been extremely damaging for some poor people out there.
So, is it time for you to switch?
If your WordPress site is slow, unreliable, or growing beyond your current hosting plan, it could be time to upgrade. We should take a moment to say that – in our experience – your first port of call for a site with poor performance is to make sure its up to date, unnecessary plugins are uninstalled, resource hungry or inefficient plugins are replaced, and that you optimise things like images and videos to reduce processing time. Straight-up upgrading your hosting plan as a first step likely isn’t the brightest idea to fix a slow website.
However, assuming you’ve taken care of the basics, better hosting means a better experience for your visitors – and therefore, much more likely success for your business. Not sure where to start? We can help! Drop us a line for advice on the best options for your WordPress site – you might not even need an upgrade. And, as always, our advice is free.