How Web Hosting Providers Drive User Experience

User experience is often defined as a measure of people’s behaviour towards a product or service. It is a hard task to quantify it objectively and it is not necessary that an item liked by one, maybe liked by another person. Customer perception plays an influencing role on how usable is the product for a particular customer.

In a nutshell, the user experience comprises of all the factors that can affect the customer’s willingness for carrying out a business. It becomes essentially important for businesses to learn how web hosting can help deliver a critical customer/user experience.

Some of the methods in which the web hosting providers drive the user-experience include-

1. Selection of a Right Hosting to Manage Surges

The ultimate embarrassing situation in user experience happens when the website crashes due to a rapid spike in traffic. Whenever an online content, product or services are viralized, there are chances for an entrepreneur to get paid for his hard work. If the web hosting provider is unable to offer you the mitigation passage in case of traffic surges, then your website is going to crash. This can result in customers forming a first-bad impression of the website and may land up at the competitor’s page. As a website owner, it is difficult to predetermine the traffic, thus website owners need to ensure that the hosting provider easy scalability.

VPS Hosting can be a great tool for all the websites and web apps that face an instant surge in the traffic. For others, even cloud hosting can be an appropriate tool as the VPS and cloud hosting are the emerging trends in the web hosting industry.

2. Location of Servers

When the servers are located close to customers, the page loading speed increases because the data travels a much shorter distance from the server to the customer’s browser. In the case of the global distribution of customers, there is a need to place the servers at locations where the users are distributed. Further, servers located in some areas could even trigger security warnings in the browser of visitors. This could lead to shying away of potential customers to such kinds of warnings, and ultimately affecting the user experience of the site in a negative way.

3. Communication with Host Support

In case the hosting provider is offering great supports and even responding promptly to the raised issues, then one should be able to quickly resolve the outages, site failures, and issues pertaining to availability. Availability takes place only when a potential customer or lead is unable to access the website at the time of its need. This leads to the website going down due to a surge in website traffic and thus customers begin to drift away to the competitor’s website.

4. Using A Web Hosting Which Offers Web Acceleration

Most of the leading websites are able to maintain user experience in the midst of technology changes, or even fluctuating traffic volumes. This is possible as these leading websites use a diverse number of approaches. Every optimization done is not able to able to achieve it by themselves. When they are combined, they ensure the constant availability of the sites. The significant user experiences are mostly caches, load balancing and pipelining. In order to work seamlessly well, the stated features have to be implemented at a server level.

Techniques of load balancing, enhanced cache loading, and web acceleration tools are essential when loading time is considered. In case the visitors have to wait for a few times until the website is loaded, then there is a high chance that they might exit the website, thereby, increasing the bounce rates for the website. Thus, by having web acceleration tools the user experience is definitely enhanced.

5. Use of Plugins and Apps

The improvement in user experience is the sole responsibility of the website owner. For instance, uploading a lot of multimedia content on the website increases the time for a page of the website to load. By having a content that needs plugins creates a negative impact on usability.

4 Pillars of Web Design Usability

Following are the 4-pillars that can be of great help for improving the usability of a website and ultimately enhancing the user experience as well-

1. Well-defined Navigation

Several websites tend to split up their content between their multiple pages, which in turn enables the users to navigate between these pages using the menus. It is obvious that businesses need to make an easy navigation website, though, some sites lack clear navigation schemes in exchange for fancy and flashy components included in the website.

2. Performance

Though a website may appear to be compelling and easy to navigate, it can face sluggish issues. The problem with performance resides in the fact that it is hard to gauge the slowness of a website for the users. The business website owners need to adopt the rule of thumb, that the site should not take more than 2 seconds. If the time taken to load the page increases by that 2 seconds, there is a high probability that many visitors on the website tend to erode. This can cause businesses to lose out on potential conversions. The website can be faster if the selected web hosting takes the page performance on a serious note.

3. Readability

A lot of content present online is mostly based. If the web design makes it difficult to read the content, then there is a huge flaw on the end of website owners. There exist several ways in which the content of the website can be improved for readability purposes. Though, in most of the cases, the bottom for clearer readability rests with the fonts chosen as well as the contrast used.

There lies a reason why white backgrounds are gaining popularity on most of the websites. The reason can be credited to the fact that it is simpler to implement the high-contrast elements and ensure readability when working with a white background. The use of such contrasts ultimately helps the visitors to reach the intended content on the website.

4. Responsiveness

A website may look stunning on a desktop version, but businesses also need to adapt it for mobile users. In today’s time, people are more connected to their mobile devices than the desktop system. This can be a problem, when the usability factor is taken into account, as a lot of websites weren’t previously designed by keeping in mind the smaller mobile interfaces.

This is the point, where responsiveness plays a crucial role. By implementing responsiveness, the websites work smoothly irrespective of the device on which it is displayed- be it desktop systems or mobile devices. The adaption of the website for mobile devices is no longer complicated and most of the WordPress themes have been responsive. Thus, a responsive website may not be able to offer a clear navigation scheme or proper scaled-down content. It is all up to the website owners and developers to address identify such potential issues and also address them.

Conclusion

User experience (UX) defines a measure of how willing the people are to carry out their businesses. A great UX for a lousy product may not be able to improve the product, but a bad UX can definitely kill such a great product. It is an often overlooked aspect of usability and this role is often played by the web hosting providers. The provision of a good UX is an ongoing task that involves determining the things that can appeal to its users by offering them more of the same.