Understanding Correlation between Page Load Speed and Type of Hosting

There are multiple reasons why page load speed is drawing immense attention in hosting industry. One of the most important factor for sudden focus on page load speed is due to recent announcement by Google that is would be one of the attributes of page ranking since it is added to ranking algorithms.

In spite of the significance of page load speed in terms of user experience and Search Engine Optimization, it has not been taken seriously in addition to a plethora of misguiding information being disseminated by different sources.

Web hosting service is one of the often ignored but vital contributing factors for improvement of page load speed. The article therefore attempts to discuss multiple factors related to web hosting that are responsible for influencing page load speeds.

Realistic advantages of page load speed

In order to distill the importance of better page load speed, let us focus on some of the hard core benefits of faster loading sited.

Search Engine Optimization- As stated earlier, page load speed is an added algorithm for Google ranking. However, when we analyze the data, it is found that the speed factor has insignificant impact on rankings. Therefore it would be prudent not to overstate this factor while discussing the relevance of page load speed.

User experience- Influence of greater page load speed on overall experience of site visitors is significantly greater than that of Google ranking. This has been clearly brought out in wide assortment of studies and is also well documented. It has been noticed that sudden abandonment of sites by users is due to slow loading sites. More importantly, it also leads to reduction in conversion rates.

One should take into consideration the volume of traffic to the website to determine the benefits in terms of added revenues. If you are looking at a big ecommerce site, then the benefits are magnified in comparison with small online enterprises experiencing moderate traffic.

Page loading factors

Any visitor this opening a web page is essentially requesting information from a remote sever. This information is stored I form of files and can be a static web page or a live streaming of event. The ability of server to deliver this information faster is an important criterion for prompt fulfillment of the request.

If we try to dig deeper, then we can appreciate that the server has to perform three vital functions while loading the requested web page including the following:

• Execution of multiple codes is an important aspect of opening a web page. These codes can be written in PHP or other languages and the computer needs some time for code execution.
   
• Since a website is run by Content Management System, it needs run hundreds or thousands of database queries before delivering a single page. The database queries have to retrieve the requested webpage from database and the process requires some time to finish.
   
• Efficiency of the web server is an important parameter because it has to serve up multiple files for opening a web page.

Relevance of web hosting plans

It is unfortunate that web hosting plans are selected by many website owners only on the basis of costs. The kind of web hosting plan you select can have a considerable impact on the loading speed of website. Most of the parameters that are responsible for faster hosting package and faster page loading are common.

• Guaranteed and dedicated availability of resources including memory and processing power that are not going to be shared by other resource hungry websites. This explains the reason to choose a VPS plan rather than a shared hosting package.
   
• You need to make sure that your website is also supported with greater resource availability of the resources by shifting to dedicated server hosting.
   
• In comparison with Hard Disk Drives, Solid State Drives are appreciated to load files much faster.
   
• It is observed that positioning of resources and databases on a different server in few of the shared hosting plans can delay page loading. These resources should be made available on the same web server.
  
  Understanding impact of hosting plans on site speed

If you are running resource intensive websites that involve execution of multitude of database queries and code, then provisioning of dedicated resources can significantly enhance page loading speeds.

It is observed that page load speed can be enhanced by a whopping 62 percent in VPS hosting service than in shared hosting package. The selection of web hosting package from the point of view of faster loading side assumes greater importance for sites that are powered by Magento. Usually, you should consider leaving a shared hosting plan if too many sites in same environment are fighting for resources.

Takeaway

Upgrading of a web hosting package must be considered to improve site speed in addition to front end SEO tactics such as image optimization and minimization of JavaScript.