eCommerce is a bustling, exciting world that’s full of potential for the ambition entrepreneur. But your hosting service could be the surprising difference between soaring profits and stagnant growth. Hosting is the engine room for your business. And if you have an aggressive eCommerce growth strategy, you need to make sure that the engine room is ready for action. Read on as we outline why hosting could unlock your eCommerce website’s potential.
The Importance of Reliable Hosting in eCommerce
Central to any eCommerce growth strategy is robust hosting. Think of it as the backbone of your online store. You need excellent infrastructure to keep your site operational during any circumstances.
Good hosting means fast loading times, minimal downtime, and secure transactions. Those three things influence your customers’ experience, conversation rates, and reviews. Without good hosting, even the most innovative products will struggle to experience growth.
Hosting Features You Need for eCommerce Growth
We’ve established that hosting is essential. But what should you look for in a hosting package to help you achieve that eCommerce growth?
First, look for uptime guarantees. You want your site to be available 99.99% of the time. Because even a few minutes of downtime each month could potentially lose sales, slowing your growth.
Second, look at the bandwidth and storage on offer. It must be scalable so that it grows with your business.
Third, read reviews to get a feel for the customer service support from your hosting provider. If you have a problem, you want a business that will promptly act.
Last, look for security features that give your customers peace of mind, such as SSL support and DDoS protection.
Hosting and Your eCommerce Performance
Hosting has a surprising number of ways it can impact an eCommerce store. First, poor hosting can sometimes mean slow loading time for your website. The initial impact of this is your users’ experience. It lowers trust in your brand and causes frustration for customers trying to buy a product. But it can also effect your search engine rankings if users begin to abandon your website.
Good bandwidth prevents site delays when you have peak traffic. Imagine your product gets featured in a high-profile magazine and receives an influx of traffic on a single day. You don’t want to lose that opportunity because of poor bandwidth.
Scaling Your eCommerce Website
As your business grows, you need your hosting to scale to support that growth. The infrastructure needs the capacity to handle more customers, transactions and data. You need to do that without compromising site performance or uptime. So when looking for a hosting platform, find a flexible package so that if you need to switch to a high-performance server, you can.
Security Considerations
Security is also paramount to eCommerce growth. Good security is at the heart of your reputation. As your brand becomes a household name, you want to remain a trusted website. A security issue like customer data theft could cause enough reputational damage to wipe out much of your growth strategy overnight. Secure data starts with the right hosting. It’s one reason you should always choose a trusted and reliable hosting provider.
Steps to Choosing an eCommerce Hosting Solution
If you want to grow your eCommerce website, here are five simple steps to finding a reliable and trusted eCommerce hosting solution.
Step 1: Identify Your Needs
List your core website requirements. If you already run an eCommerce website, start with a look at your traffic numbers. Exceptionally high-traffic websites will need more high-performance hosting. A startup won’t need as much. Think too about what you need in terms of storage, bandwidth, and technical support. Once you know what you need, create a shortlist of providers that tick those boxes.
Step 2: Check Uptime Guarantees
When choosing hosting offers, view packages that offer a high percentage of guaranteed uptime. For an eCommerce store with an aggressive growth strategy, you ideally need 99.99%.
Step 3: Consider Security
Once you’ve shortlisted hosting packages and checked uptime guarantees, it’s time to filter your shortlist again. This time you need to focus on security features. Look for those offering SSL, DDoS protection, and malware scans.
Step 4: Look for Scalability
Hosting packages come with minimum contract periods. Check whether the contract allows you to scale up your hosting if your business grows before you reach the end of your contract. Flexible plans mean your infrastructure won’t hold you back if you grow faster than anticipated.
Step 5: Review Customer Support
Finally, review online testimonials and customer feedback to determine which provider offers the best customer support. Ideally, you want one that can offer as much personalized support as possible so that you aren’t stuck talking to a call center when you have an emergency.
eCommerce Growth Strategy: Set Yourself Up for Success
Don’t let technology slow you down if you have ambitions for your business. Any sound eCommerce strategy needs to have hosting on the to-do list. Invest in the best and you’ll invest in your business. Ready to find the perfect solution? Head here to check out our fantastic hosting packages now.
