Often overlooked but this can cost you sales...

Do you test your site's performance? You should. You'd be shocked at the potential effect of page loading on conversion, especially if you're using a long sales page, lots of images and scripts, video or other data-heavy features.

This is something I rarely gave a thought to until it became an issue recently. All of a sudden my sales dropped steeply and I figured it was a slump... happens from time to time. Of course I checked all my site functions, buy buttons, etc. but found no problems.

I got really concerned when things went from bad to worse and continued for several days. But I still had no idea what was going on. Finally, a friend tried to visit my site and mentioned that it took forever to load. On top of that, the shopping cart was also very slow-loading.

How could this be? A year ago I had upgraded hosting because the shared servers I was on got slow at peak periods. I was real happy with my new host. But I figure they must have bumped me onto a heavily loaded server recently and I didn't have a clue. When I visit my own site it's cached in my system and so always loads quickly.

Could something as simple as page loading have such a dramatic effect on sales? Well, two days ago I switched to high-performance VPS hosting and my site loads like greased lightning. More importantly, sales returned to normal immediately... it's too much to be a coincidence!

I learned several lessons here:

1. It should be obvious in our impatient world but page-loading time is extremely important. Don't you often click away after waiting more than a few seconds? And there's no second chance. Don't let your customers get away before they even see your headline!

2. Don't trust your host. Keep a close eye on your site performance and don't accept poor standards. 99.9% uptime is meaningless if it comes with poor page loading. And it's your responsibility to ensure that your coding and site structure are efficiently streamlined.

3. Don't skimp on hosting. Most of us settle for cheap shared hosting. Honest services admit that these servers often slow down at peak times... the very times that you should be getting most of your traffic!

Your sites' reliability and performance is a crucial part of your business... and you trust that to a $4.95 a month service? VPS hosting is available now at very reasonable rates and I highly recommend it along with a robust plan to handle all contingencies. $50/month for hosting is a drop in the bucket in terms of business expenses. You get what you pay for.