Whether you’re a brand new blogger or a well established business, it’s important to keep an eye on the competition. They can help dictate your next move, and they’re a great tool for figuring out where you are in the grand scheme of things. Alternatively, you might even be able to partner or collaborate with them in some way – just because they are your online “competition” doesn’t mean that your relationship with them needs to be competitive all the time.
What is clear though, is that if they have superior hosting to you, they will be giving their website visitors a better experience than you give yours. So ensuring that you give your blog, online business or retail store the best chance at succeeding starts with ensuring you have solid hosting.
Here are some of the biggest signs that your competition has a better hosting setup than you, and what to do about it:
- Their site is faster
- You’ve never seen them down
- Their site works properly (and yours doesn’t)
There are many factors which impact the speed of a website, and the host is major part of that. If you use the same browser to poke around on your site, then do the same with the competition, is theirs faster? It might also be because your site has a lot of rich content like pop-ups or videos, which is another issue you need to tackle. Speed is paramount because visitors expect instantaneous responses now.
A smart competitor keeps a regular eye on the competition and an open ear about any positives and negatives that their customers might have to say. If you’ve never noticed their website being down but you’ve experienced it more than once yourself, they probably have a better host than you. Sometimes servers do go down for things like maintenance, which is why no web host can promise 100% uptime. However, if it’s obvious that the competition is down less often than you, that’s a strong sign that you need to change hosts.
Broken functionality on your site can be a sign that your website isn’t keeping your software up to date. If you can see that your competitor’s sites function wonderfully, while your users struggle to complete even the most basic of tasks like checking out or searching, that’s a good sign that you need to look at other hosting providers.
Competing in a digital world is cutthroat, and it’s important that you don’t try and skimp on something as crucial as hosting. A great web host can vastly improve your customer’s experience and is a lot more affordable than people think.
