Marketing your online store effectively and making sales requires a good mix of strategy, smart content and engagement with your customers. But there’s one thing you may not have thought of in your digital marketing strategy: the impact of web hosting on user experience.
Stick with us as we shed light on the profound impact that optimal web hosting can have on elevating your sales and marketing engagement. Hold tight and take notes because we’re about to uncover the intricacies and nuances that distinguish mere websites from powerful, revenue-driving platforms.
How Web Hosting Silently Kills or Boosts Your Sales and Marketing Game
Don’t assume your web host is just a static digital “plot of land” on which your website resides. It’s so much more than that – and choosing hastily can, unfortunately, have drastic effects on your marketing efforts and in turn, your sales. Here’s how it can either kill or boost each one.
Website Speed and Performance
A slow website is like a long queue at a brick-and-mortar store. Your customers might wait for a bit, but eventually, they may choose to leave because what they’re buying isn’t “worth the wait.”
Unfortunately, in the digital world, your potential customer isn’t going to sit and wait for 10 or 15 minutes before giving up. Online, you have all of three seconds to get things moving or more than half of your potential buyers will leave – before they even see your product!
On the other hand, offer a speedy browsing experience and your visitors can move down the sales funnel much more smoothly. Expect your conversion rate to increase because you’re making the process streamlined and easy for them.
Uptime and Reliability
A web host that offers less than 99.9% uptime could knock your sales. The more time your website’s down, the more time there is for potential customers to get frustrated… And every less-than-happy visitor can contribute to a negative brand reputation.
A great web host offers 99.99% uptime (or more.) Minimizing the time your site’s offline ensures optimal accessibility and very little chance of someone coming across your site when it’s not actually working.
Poor brand reputation and an unreliable website can damage user trust before you’ve even had a chance to build it. A high level of user trust is required to drive a purchase, so in the long run, your web host’s uptime and your site’s subsequent reliability could end up hurting your sales.
SEO Optimization
You can have the greatest products on the planet, but if you’re not easy to find online… Well, you’re going to have trouble getting people to buy. SEO is a huge part of your reach, even if you’re running paid ads – the less you can spend in getting those customers to your site, the better.
Your web host plays a much bigger role in SEO than you might realize. Multiple factors can lower your chance of ranking, even if you’ve done good keyword research and written great content. Poor website speed, reliability, security, and even server location can undermine your SEO efforts.
But choose an excellent web host with great loading speed, robust security, and a content delivery network, and Google will reward you with better rankings, leading to more organic traffic flowing into your sales funnel.
Website Security
It goes without saying that a website with poor security is a bad thing. You only need one breach of visitor privacy or a single leak of customers’ sensitive data for your brand reputation to be ruined forever.
User trust is a huge factor in getting the sale. Nobody will buy from someone they don’t trust, so splurging on a super secure web host is really in your best interest. Plus, Google checks out your site security too, and can knock you down the rankings if it’s not up to scratch.
Happy Users, Happy Wallet
Happy people are much easier to convert. Unhappy people won’t simply be led down the sales funnel, they’ll find obstacles at every turn.
Imagine popping onto a website so smooth, so fast, and so engaging that it’s as easy as walking from one room to another. A good web host will do that for your site. Now, think about trying to walk through a gigantic, thick spider web between rooms. That’s more like how it feels for a user trying to navigate a website with a bad web host.
Ultimately, a positive user experience is much more likely to lead to a sale. A negative user experience is almost always likely to lead to a bounce. It’s in your best interest to pick your web host wisely.
Choose Your Host Wisely
How do you know whether you’re choosing a web host that will boost your marketing and increase sales or working with one that’s a one-way road to ruining your business? Here’s our tried-and-true advice for sales and marketing success.
- Dedicated or Cloud Hosting: Avoid shared hosting as it’s vastly less reliable and secure than the rest.
- Superb Uptime Guarantee: We recommend 99.99% to ensure your site is pretty much always available. Fewer frustrated visitors allow for more opportunities to make the sale.
- A Content Delivery Network: This spreads your content across servers worldwide, ensuring fast loading times no matter where your visitor is. Fast loading = faster moving through that funnel.
- Enhanced Marketing Capabilities: Consider a host with built-in marketing features that can help drive your efforts. No need to spend extra on marketing software if it comes built in!
- Excellent Security Features: An SSL certificate, firewalls, malware scans, regular updates, and more. You want every possible layer to protect your customers.
- Reliable Technical Support: Look for a host with 24/7 support in a variety of ways: email, phone, and live/bot chat.
It’s a no-brainer – your marketing efforts and subsequent sales won’t be as great as they could be if your website is built on a poor web host. Fnding a host that ticks all the boxes and gives you what your users need is a solid foundation for huge success.
Author
Get our newsletter and digital focus reports
Stay current on learning and development trends, best practices, research, new products and technologies, case studies and much more.
