Web hosting is no stranger to this behavior. Your website visitors expect a fast loading speed. If they don’t get it, it is very likely that they will abandon it in favour of the next competitor.
The average patience of a user is usually about two or three seconds. If the page has not loaded by then, 40% leave the page and look for the information elsewhere. There is no need to remind you that your page must be ready for the challenge.
What to try
There are several ways to make sure that the loading time of your page is optimized. The first is to carry out a speed test of your hosting, to have a reference. Use one of the many free tests available such as Google Page Speed or Pingdom.
Once you know the speed of your website, you can compare it with other cheap hosting providers. To do this, request a test before paying and of course do not rely on the loading speed of the main page of the hosting as they are not normally hosted on the same machines used to store the pages of customers.
This is especially serious in the case of shared hosting and VPS. The ideal is to find web pages already hosted by the company you are interested in and perform the speed test as if it were your own. This is the most reliable way to measure speed.
What to look for
When you perform one of these tests, you will be shown a list of items that affect the loading speed of your page. The total time it takes to load the page is usually the first thing shown. Other data is also shown such as connection time, which is how long it takes to establish a connection with the web server, or download time, which shows how long it takes to download a part of your website to have a reference.
Another important thing to keep in mind is the search time of your domain. It is the time it takes for the domain to access the correct IP address and DNS. It is an interesting test because sometimes DNS are not contracted with the same company and if the results are not optimal may be due to our domain registrar is slowing down the load of our website.
Solve problems
Normally the Google Pagespeed website shows quite a few errors and things to improve when testing a website. Many of the bugs that it shows have easy solution and others not so much. Normally having an optimized WordPress template helps a lot with this topic, since the loading speed will be higher and the list of errors lower.
The ideal is to get results of 80% or better in both the normal load test and the mobile device test.
The most frequent errors usually have to do with the response time of the server, which is attributable to our hosting and nothing else, and other errors related to the optimization of images, for which we can rely on plugins such as Wp Smush or the famous web kraken.io with which we can reduce the maximum size of our images before uploading them to our blog.
Another common error is to “minify” the Javascript, HTML and other code of our website, something that can be solved manually or by relying on a dedicated WordPress plugin for the task, such as the many WordPress cache plugins out there.