The recognition of your brand starts from the moment your customers first hear your name and continues for as long as you remain in business. It goes without saying that brand upkeep is one of the key factors in ensuring you enjoy healthy sales and continued competitiveness. Without good brand awareness and recognition, you’d struggle to get new clients, you might be overtaken by more visible brands, you might even lose customers as you slowly fade from people’s memory.

That’s why you should always strive to keep your brand at the fore of your customers’ thoughts and do everything necessary to make sure you stay there.

Web Hosting Matters

Reliable web hosting is one of the most important things that can help you stay in the mind of your consumers. It carries all that you would like to present to the online world.

Make sure you have the best web hosting provider that can cater to your specific needs from the very beginning. You should never settle or sacrifice anything for the sake of saving money – the costs you save today will make you pay dearly in the future by negatively affecting your brand’s reputation.

Poor Web Hosting Negatively Affects Branding

How exactly can opting for a web hosting solution that is sub-par, for whatever reason, hurt your branding efforts? Let’s take a look.

1. You Won’t Be There

One thing people love about their favorite website is the fact that they can browse it whenever they want to. It subconsciously gives them comfort to know you are always there. How many times has your favorite website been down? Did you go back to it or did you move on to the next site on the list?

You likely moved on, either going to another favorite website, or returning to your search engine results and clicking on the next link down.

2. You Won’t Rank High

Indeed, the world of search engine ranking is quite complicated. Every search engine has their own algorithms that determine who ranks where. One thing they all agree on, though, is whether or not a website is available. High availability contributes to good search engine optimization (SEO).

To ensure you have good uptime, you need a hosting provider that is reliable. If you have a provider with servers that crash way too often, or ones that lose connectivity on a regular basis, your website’s SEO will eventually be affected. That’s not good – if people can’t find you:

• They won’t know about your brand.
• They won’t be able to do business with you.
• They’ll lose trust in you and won’t return.

In short, not being online will negatively affect your visibility and, hence, your brand.

3. You Won’t Be Able to Sell

Being online means you can make sales online. Your business’ survival depends on the profit you make. If you’re not online long enough for a sale to go through, there is no way your potential client is going to hang around. If you can’t be found in the first place, it’s that much worse.

Your reputation will be tarnished. Bad news travels fast on the internet, so don’t leave users with a bad sales experience, or it may be the end of your digital career.

4. You’ll Earn Negative Reviews

People love sharing their bad experiences. As the saying goes, misery loves company. If people can’t find your site, if it’s down all the time, or if they get booted off mid-transaction, your business will quickly earn negative reviews.

Unfortunately, this can make your future sales plummet. About 84 percent of people trust an online review as much as a personal recommendation, so if you’re getting bad digital press, chances are people will stop buying from you.

On top of that, people are three times more likely to write a negative review than they are a positive one. This means that even if you were to provide your customers with a perfect user experience, they might still not write a review about you. You won’t be so lucky with the displeased users who could tarnish your business’ reputation for life.

These repercussions can leave a digital footprint that’s impossible to erase. That’s why it’s crucial to take a close look at your hosting service to make sure you have the best you can get – before it’s too late.

Need help? Take a look at our top web hosting providers of 2017 and see if they have what you’re looking for.