2021 brought about many changes and challenges for SMBs, but one of the most vital things we learned and are entitled to keep in mind is how important the business website is. Today, online orders, in many ways, are outselling physical store locations, and this trend is not set to stop anytime soon. Your website is among the most critical asset your SMB possesses, and its uptime is vital to the ability to allow customers to reach you whenever they need to. Sometimes, shared WordPress hosting can experience downtime, which seems out of your control. Top-rated web hosting services and domain name registration services from all over the world will tell you that uptime is something you cannot afford to be without. An unreliable website is one that customers will quickly shy away from, so allow us to help you improve your server uptime with these tips.
Image Compression
Images on websites are essential. They provide a visual depiction of products, services and are a window into what the business truly is. A website with just text will certainly not be attractive to many visitors and can also negatively affect your SEO. However, the size of the image and the level of pixels it has can drastically affect your site's uptime. Images that offer the highest resolution possible with the most pixels are naturally tricky to load and take time.
An overabundance of high-quality images can lead to downtime on your shared hosting site, so consider bringing down the pixel count of each image. Utilize newer forms of image formats such as WebP or JPegXG to help you reduce the size of the image without diminishing its visual quality. Although you may only reduce the pixel count marginally on each image, it will have a more drastic effect on your website uptime overall.
Website Compression
Often, just focusing on image size may not be enough to improve uptime ultimately. However, your website might be more extensive than it needs to be. Sometimes, overzealous SMB owners can put too much on their website and leave little to the customer's imagination. It is vital to get your views, values, and most importantly, your brand into the mind's eye of your customer. It is not vital that you tell them every detail about your company. Use tools such as GZIP to reduce the size of your website from megs to KBs, and you will see a vast improvement in your uptime. Remember to keep all necessary information, but much of your press releases and some of your blogs can be dedicated to social media sites and kept off the leading site.
CDNS
CDNS can be remarkably beneficial to your website performance and perception from a customer point of view. One of the issues related to website downtime is when customers visit the site and are presented with a notification that the site is temporarily unavailable. This can be a deterrent from the customer ever returning to the site, and even if the site is just down for a moment, you can lose customers. CDNS are essential as they create a static copy of your website used for revisits from former customers. This might not seem very important, but even if your site is down for a few moments, the customer will be unaware and continue visiting the site. CDNS can also boost security measures for your site as well.
Guard Your Site Against DDOS Attacks
When you buy WordPress hosting and low-cost domain registration, you are given a set of security features that go along with your subscription. Generally, most SMB owners may opt for the lowest cost package available. Yes, it can save you money upfront for your site, but the lowest affordable WordPress hosting may not guard against DDOS attacks, and these attacks can bring your uptime to a screeching halt. Ask about improving your website security and guard against the potential for DDOS attacks by simply paying the extra for premium services. The reduced risk for a DDOS attack will vastly improve your website security, performance and give you added peace of mind.
Improving your website's uptime is very important to remain competitive in this increasingly competitive online world we live in. Shared WordPress hosting sites can do a lot to help you improve security from their end, but the SMB owner can do even more on their side of the spectrum, so consider all the options listed above and adapt them to the needs of your business website.