As a designer, so much of your day goes into making sure external things don’t ruin your work. You have to content with things like absurd client deadlines and even more absurd client feedback.
The last thing you need is a decision to go with a cheap host undercutting all of your hard work and design expertise.
If you haven’t experienced it yet, here his how bad hosting kills good design.
It Slows Your Site Down
You’ve done everything in your power to make this site as lean and as fast as possible. There are no excessive elements or bulky coding. Everything on the site serves a purpose and it should load in the bare minimum number of seconds.
But the client chose a bargain basement host. Now all of your hard work is wasted and moot because the cheap host has slow performance.
Try your best to prevent this before it happens by referring the client to these WordPress hosting solutions from HostPapa and explaining to them that spending a little bit more gives them so much more value.
It Punishes You For Doing Your Job Well
Cheap hosts are famous for truncating your speeds to save bandwidth and resources, should your site start to get too much traffic.
Too much traffic? How could there even be such a thing? With a cheap host, there very much is.
You create an engaging site and nail your SEO optimization, so you start to see a good amount of traffic. However, your cheap host isn’t built for this level of traffic, so they will deliberately slow down your site. You’re effectively being punished for being too good.
Once this happens, you may try to upgrade your package with them to take off the constraints, or even move to another host completely. Both of these processes are notoriously frustrating, as days may turn into weeks.
It Kills Both SEO and CRO
You have spent late nights obsessing over this site’s search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization. Both are a dance of science and art moving in perfect unison.
However, again, your work is undone by a bad host. First of all, Google has openly stated that speed is very much a factor in how they rank and assess your site’s value. It may not matter how well you’ve optimized the backend if people can’t even load your home page in less than 10 seconds.
Meanwhile, your conversions are hit even harder. You’ve taken hours to form the perfect user experience with no friction between the product selection, adding it to a cart, and checking out.
But, the site goes live and nobody is buying or converting because the lag is so severe that they assume the site is experiencing technical difficulties. They’re not ready to pull out their MasterCard because they’re impatient and don’t even trust this transaction will go through.
The client has just lost a sale and handed a buy-ready lead to the competition. This person knows exactly what they want, and they’re just looking for someone to take their money.
As designers, it’s always in our best interest to remind clients that this is not an area where they should be looking to cut costs. They will pay for it eventually through lost speed, SEO clout, and even sales.
Try to tell them that cheap hosting is may actually be the most expensive thing in digital marketing.
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