Before you pull the trigger and enter your payment information for an overseas hosting company for your website, there’s something you should know. That “cheap” host is going to cost you a fortune.
As business owners and entrepreneurs, we all want to save a buck where we can. Your web hosting is not the place you want to do this. The quality and the physical location of your host can have a massive impact on your website’s ability to rank with Google and convert leads/ customers.
Here’s why you need WordPress hosting in Canada for a Canadian site and you should accept no substitutes.
Your SEO
Speed has never been more important than it is right now. Your site’s load speed is absolutely crucial to your SEO, with Google rolling out mobile-first indexing and the release of the Google speed update, your mobile site has to load quickly if you want either your mobile or your desktop site to rank.
Of course, “fast” is relative. However, in today’s marketplace, you don’t want to take any chances and you need to eliminate anything that can slow you down. And overseas hosting can slow you down.
Cheap and overseas hosts are typically able to offer you such low prices because they don’t have much in the way of facilities. They’re only able to handle a few customers and that’s all they need to make a profit. This means every new customer they add can take away from your bandwidth.
Second of all, because their resources are limited, they may slow you down on purpose if they decide your website is getting too much traffic and eating up too much of their limited bandwidth.
Your CRO
Everything we just said about an overseas host’s slow speeds killing your SEO also applies to your CRO.
In the world of CRO, the damage slow speeds and wait times will do is measured in fractions of a second, not whole seconds. Your site will immediately lose about half of your traffic if your users have to wait for more than three seconds for the page to load. After that, you could see a 1% drop in your conversion rate for every 100-millisecond delay in the page loading.
That’s if the page even loads at all. Your overseas hosting company also likely can’t offer the same uptime rates as more trusted hosts. Their uptime stats are skewed. Even if your site is too slow for a user to reasonably use, they will still count that as uptime. However, as far as the user is concerned, your site is down and their next stop is your competitor’s site.
Quality hosting does cost more than cheap overseas hosting. However, it is not expensive. You are likely paying more for a movie streaming site right now. But, the extra value you get through spending just a little bit more is immeasurable. The fate of your site’s SEO and CRO are literally at stake.
So, don’t take any chances with overseas web hosting companies. It pays to shop local!
