Having a stable and secure hosting environment is critical for the success of any business, especially if they run online sales or ecommerce. Whenever possible, you need to aim, and pay, for the best hosting solution and provider you can get for your site.

Bu how do you know how well your site is performing? One of the most useful business metrics to keep an eye on are your site’s engagement rates. These can be very negatively impacted if you have poor or unreliable web hosting.

What is website engagement rate?

Your website’s engagement rates reflect the process you need to implement if you want to build a relationship with your customers and site visitors. The better your engagement rates, the higher the chances these people will become your brand ambassadors.

Engagement rates cover visitor time spent on page, return rate, comment or action rates and more. So, the more you engage or interact with your visitors, the higher the chances of their going on to spread the word about how good you are at handling customer service and sales support. In case the engagement is built over support for your products, it will show that you care about how your product affects your consumers and the extent you will go to make sure they are satisfied.

How does your web hosting affect your engagement rates?

One of the best measures to ensure you have good engagement rates is by making sure that you have a webhosting plan and provider that is:

• Fast: Every millisecond it takes to load your pages or process a request matters. Internet users have become increasingly impatient and fussy about how long it takes to get what they are looking for.
• Secure: In a world where online security has become a paranoid obsession of every single one of us that goes online, you wouldn’t want to have a website that could expose people to hackers, viruses, or other malwares.
• Always Up: As you can imagine, without a website where people can actually reach your business or products, the engagement will be exactly equal to zero.

With this in mind, you can now appreciate how you will need to have a great hosting solution. Otherwise, you will lose engagement rates due to:

Frustrated Customers

Having a slow website that takes forever to load or lags whenever your customers try to make purchases will frustrate them enough to entirely scare them away. Apart from losing the chance to engage with your clients, you are:

• Losing revenue directly as your customers decide not to do business with you
• Driving your potential and current customers straight into the arms of your competitors

Of course, you should always make sure your web pages themselves and any process that runs on them aren’t the culprits before putting the blame on your hosting provider.

Being Ignored by Search Engines

One of the criteria that will help your website climb most search engines’ rankings is the load speed of your pages. If your SEO rankings take a hit, it will mean your potential and current customers will not be able to find you or your products.

Simply Not Being There

Your web hosting provider’s server up time should be one of the first things you research before you sign up with them. If they have dismal up times, that means you’ll have a dismal website availability record. This then translates to your clients not being able to find you – simply because you are not there. How, pray tell, do you plan to engage with your clients who can’t find you? How do you engage when you don’t even have a website?

Testing Customers’ Patience

Your most loyal customers might allow you to have a couple of days’ downtime. Those that have true connections with your products and services, or feel a sense of loyalty towards you, will probably not be put off by a few site-crashes. But, if it happens once too often, you might even see them turn their backs on you.

The best way to make sure this doesn’t happen is to opt for a web hosting provider with superb support systems and personnel in place. The research into how good a hosting provider’s support is should also be done before you sign on the dotted line with them.

What do you do, then?

By now you should be wondering what you need to do when the failures mentioned above have become too much to endure and have started to negatively affect your business’ performance. Well, the simplest answer is to first try to sort things out with your hosting provider and reach a deal where they can guarantee better performance. If that doesn’t work, or the performance falls back to its pre-negotiation levels, it is simply time to pack it up and look for a new web hosting solution provider.