How do you know if your website hosting is letting you down?

Given the amount of confusion there is about what indicates good hosting or not, here is a simple test to indicate whether your hosting is doing its best for your website or not.

  1. Visit the homepage of your website in your favourite browser.
  2. Then do a Ctrl+R  (that’s the CTRL key and the R key pressed together). Count how long it takes your homepage to download (i.e say out one thousand, two thousand, etc)

All things being equal this will give you a rough count, in seconds, of how long it took to load to a new visitor – your web page should load in under 4 seconds to be reasonably quick.

Next. Just click on the ‘home’ button on your website, this makes the browser reload the web page but make use of what it saw the previous time, do the same counting. Your web page should load in under 2 seconds to be reasonably quick…

Finally, just surf around your website, if anything takes longer than 4 seconds to load – there is a problem somewhere. We suggest you do a double check to make sure:

  • Nobody is doing any big downloads on your internet connection at the same time (i.e. do this when things are quiet).
  • Your laptop or PC is not overloaded doing something else at the same time.

A good secondary check is to load up your website using your smart phone – it should load just as quick…

I know, this is a very rough check, but if your website doesn’t pass the above simple tests, then something is not right.

As to what the problem could  be? Many possibilities:

  • You are on shared hosting that is very restrictive on the resources allocated to each website;
  • Your hosting provider could have an overloaded connection to the Internet;
  • Your website could inefficiently coded.

Why is Website Speed Important

Simply put, people are very impatient online, if your website is slow, they will just go elsewhere. Also having a slow website can impact your search engine ranking, for similar reasons.

To find out what is going on, we suggest using the Website Checker – it will give you an actionable report with the easiest way to address the problem.

The following two tabs change content below.
My Twitter profileMy LinkedIn profile

Keith

Director at Aykira Pty Ltd
Keith is a founder of Aykira & has over 18 years experience with everything Internet. From eCommerce to security, mobile to maps; large or small. PhD in Info Systems, member Australian & British Computer Society's, ex Yahoo. Architect/Engineer/Innovator.