3 Suggestions to Improve Your Home Business Website’s Performance
Home based businesses start small, but they enjoy significant advantages over bigger ventures that begin in a separate office space. At the very least, the startup time is lower, there is very little to no extra rent to pay, and you are never too far from work or home. Note that the advantages do not just apply to exclusively online businesses either. They are applicable regardless of whether the site is meant for exclusively online work like graphic design and web development, or if it’s supposed to be an online outlet for selling your art or baked goods.
Whichever home business model you choose or may have chosen already, the business site’s performance is going to be one of the most decisive factors in its online success. On that note, let’s go through five expert suggestions from industry experts on how to improve the performance of a home business website.
Get a Reliable, Fast Internet Connection
As we are talking about website performance, it should go without saying that the internet connection is a basic requirement here. However, since we are also discussing a commercial website, the connection needs to be both fast and reliable. In other words, you need a home internet connection from a reliable ISP. To be considered reliable, the internet connection and your chosen plan should meet the following checkmarks:
- A minimum download/upload speed of 250Mbps – 500Mbps
- Symmetry between download and upload speeds
- Minimum downtime with prior alerts for any maintenance downtime periods when possible
- Ping time that’s no higher than 20ms – 40ms at any point
- Unlimited data plan without speed caps
- Competitive price to performance ratio
The requirements as stated above are necessary to ensure that all customers, clients, and visitors have a smooth, fast, and uninterrupted experience from start to finish. Slow loading speeds, hiccups while checking out, getting stuck on a half-loaded page, etc., are all bad news for any online business. Although your internet connection is not the only thing that’s responsible for ensuring all that, it’s the most important one.
Opt for a Dedicated Hosting Plan
Most small businesses, especially home-based businesses, opt for shared hosting services, aka virtual private servers (VPS). VPS is neither the most reliable, nor the most secure hosting option available. The only reason why smaller ventures go for it is because it’s cheap.
Opt for a dedicated hosting service instead, which isn’t as expensive as it used to be, especially since we are discussing cloud resources for a small home business website. You will find that even the starter plans for dedicated hosting services will help your business site perform better than it previously did on a VPS.
Ensure that Computer Hardware is Up to the Task
The days of offline-only servers are gone, and they have been replaced by cloud servers for the most part. Therefore, you actually need a fast and reliable internet connection to keep your site running from home, rather than a super expensive, chunky, desktop server. That being said, you will still need a capable computer with adequate hardware.
While cloud servers make it a lot easier to run a business site with comparatively minimal local hardware resources nowadays, you should provide the site with easy access to powerful local resources as well. A combination of local and cloud resources will always provide the best results on both the business and the client end.
