Your Hosting Server Size Is Limiting Your Rankings, Traffic And Growth

Your Hosting Server Is Limiting Your Rankings And Traffic

Having a website with great content and strong search engine optimization is important for driving traffic and getting found online.

But if your hosting server is too limited, it can actually hold your website back from reaching its full potential in search engine rankings and visitor growth.

Upgrading to more robust hosting is often the missing piece that suddenly unlocks rapid progress in your website’s performance after getting stuck at a plateau.

Choose the Right Web Hosting Server for Your Website

One of the first things to evaluate is whether your current web host provides sufficient resources for your website as it grows and expands over time.

Many people start out on basic shared hosting plans with limited bandwidth, disk space, and CPU/RAM capacity.

This lets you get online cheaply at first.

But as your traffic and number of website pages and multimedia assets swell, you can outgrow that initial starter web hosting plan.

The server resources get stretched too far, and your website’s performance suffers.

Signs you need a hosting upgrade:

• Your site loads slowly, even after code and image optimizations.
• Your server frequently hits the maximum number of concurrent connections allowed.
• You’re constantly getting notifications about exceeding bandwidth or storage limits.

When resource limitations are consistently impeding your website, it’s time to scale up to a VPS (Virtual Private Server), dedicated server, or cloud hosting plan.

These provide far greater resources that grow with your website, instead of bottlenecking its progress.

The additional monthly cost is well worth it to lift degrading performance limitations.

Think of it as a wise investment that pays off in faster growth.

Optimize Your Website Code for Faster Load Times

Before upgrading your web host, first make sure your website code itself is as streamlined and optimized as possible.

Bloated code full of inefficiencies can bog down page load speeds.

• Scan HTML, CSS and JavaScript files for ways to clean them up and simplify code. Remove unused libraries, consolidate code, and streamline functions.
• Enable compression for text-based assets like HTML, CSS, JS, and XML files. Gzip or Brotli compression shrinks files sizes.
• Resize and optimize any oversized images on your pages. Image optimization services like TinyPNG can automate this compression.
• Lazy load non-critical assets so they load later after initial page render. Deferred image/CSS loading improves startup speeds.
• Cache reusable elements like headers/footers, CSS, JS code, and image assets globally.

Faster page load times mean happier website visitors that find your content more accessible.

Google also factors site speed into search rankings. So code optimizations can improve both user experience and SEO.

Monitor Site Uptime and Server Response Times

To stay on top of your website’s ongoing performance and hardware needs, carefully monitor key metrics like:

Uptime – Use uptime monitoring to check how reliably reachable your site is 24/7 and get alerts if it goes down. Aim for 99.9%+ uptime.

Response Times – Check metrics like Time to First Byte (TTFB) to measure server response speeds. Spikes may indicate capacity issues.

Error Rates – Monitor rates of timeouts, failed requests, or HTTP error codes. Rising rates suggest stress on your web host.

Ideally, enable this performance monitoring before you start hitting limits.

That gives you advance warning to upgrade hosting proactively, rather than waiting until frequent outages or downtime force your hand.

If your current web host has chronic performance problems not rectified by support, it may be time to switch to a more reliable provider.

Scale Database Capacity as Needed

Websites relying on databases for content management, ecommerce, analytics, and other functions need to scale database capacity as their needs grow.

DBMS options like MySQL, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL have storage limits per database or cluster.

As your data storage, objects, and table rows expand, you may hit limits that degrade website performance.

Monitor your database storage utilization, growth trends, and workload demands.

When you consistently approach 70-80% of allotted capacity, it’s time to scale up.

• For managed databases, request more allocated storage resources.
• For self-hosted databases, migrate to a server with higher capacity.
• For open source DBMS, implement clustering to add nodes.

You can also optimize databases by tuning queries, adding indexes, and archiving unneeded data.

But scaling up capacity is crucial to avoid throttling growth.

Upgrade to Managed WordPress Hosting

If you currently host WordPress on basic shared hosting accounts, switching to specialized managed WordPress hosting can improve performance tremendously.

These plans optimize the servers and infrastructure specifically for WordPress sites. Benefits include:

• Auto-scaling of servers and caching to handle spikes.
• Page caching plus object/code caching for faster load times.
• CDN for faster content delivery integrated.
• Advanced security protections built-in.
• Integrated WP-optimized software stack, vs. juggling add-ons.
• Less resource conflicts with other accounts on servers.

The extra cost for managed WP hosting is justified by the superior speed, security, scalability, and support.

It eliminates many limits on growth and performance.

Add a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Using a content delivery network (CDN) provides another fast track to enhance your website’s performance and ability to scale up globally.

A CDN works by storing cached copies of your website’s assets – images, videos, CSS, JS files – on edge servers distributed geographically around the world.

Then visitors access the assets cached closest to them, instead of always hitting your origin web servers.

Benefits of adding a CDN:

• Faster content delivery, with assets served from nearby CDN edge servers.
• Reduces workload and traffic on your origin servers.
• Enhances site performance and scalability for global audiences.
• Integrates easily by changing asset URLs to CDN domain.

For sites serving significant multimedia content, a CDN is almost mandatory.

But it speeds up delivery of all static assets.

Just be sure your CDN properly caches dynamically generated pages.

Avoid Cheap Shared Hosting Plans

One shortcut many website owners take at first is signing up for low-cost, intro-level shared hosting without studying the provider closely or reading the fine print.

Shared accounts cram hundreds or even thousands of websites onto a single server.

This almost inevitably results in noisy neighbors competing for limited resources.

Drawbacks when outgrowing overcrowded shared hosting include:

• Accounts throttled when using your fair allotment of bandwidth/storage.
• Excess usage charges if you do exceed caps.
• Severe slowdowns during traffic spikes when the server is overwhelmed.
• Downtime when the shared server crashes.
• Little recourse for complaints about underpowered servers.

While cost-effective initially, cheap shared hosting ultimately hampers growth.

Instead, research hosts with reasonable quotas and fewer accounts per server.

Pay a little more upfront for quality that won’t let you down later.

Watch for Signs You’re Outgrowing Your Plan

Keep a close eye on website performance metrics and trends to spot the warning signs that your current hosting plan is holding your site back:

• Daily/monthly bandwidth usage keeps hitting ceilings.
• Load times and server response gradually slowing.
• More frequent spikes, timeouts and failed requests.
• Traffic and visitor growth stagnating.
• SEO rankings hit a plateau.

Don’t wait until your site has major outages or downtime episodes.

Monitor closely to forecast needed growth, and proactively scale up hosting before you hit a wall.

Staying one step ahead smoothes the scaling process.

Consider usage trends for:

• Bandwidth
• Storage space
• Monthly visitors
• Concurrent connections
• Pageviews
• Server load

When metrics approach 70-80% of current plan limits month after month, it’s time to size up.

Enable Caching and Compression

Two optimization techniques that help reduce server workload and speed up page delivery are caching and compression.

Enabling caching mechanisms stores full or partial copies of page assets and database queries in memory or to disk.

Then for some period, the cached copy is served up instead of dynamically regenerating the content.

This takes pressure off overtaxed servers.

Common types of caching include:

• Page caching – Full static HTML pages are cached.
• Object caching – Specific elements like components or widgets are cached.
• Database caching – Common queries and result sets are cached.

Gzip or Brotli compression for text-based files like HTML, CSS, JS, and XML shrinks their transferred size significantly. This lightens network loads.

But beware over-caching highly dynamic content or it may get stale.

Strike a balance between efficiency gains and keeping content fresh.

Optimize Database Queries and Tables

Unoptimized database operations can drag down site performance significantly.

When databases start hitting capacity limits, further optimization becomes critical.

• Tune inefficient queries and remove redundancies. Also add indexes to speed filtering and sorting.
• Scale back logging and history detail levels to essentials.
• Archive older data not needed for active operations.
• Purge unneeded tables, fields, indexes, and orphaned data.

These database rightsizing and query optimizations will provide some breathing room when your database starts hitting size or connection limits.

The Key Takeaway

Robust hosting with ample headroom is crucial for a website to scale up without hitting frustrating bottlenecks.

Monitor site performance closely across metrics, watch for growing pains, and proactively scale up server resources as your audience and content expands.

Avoid skimping on hosting costs upfront to prevent limiting your site later.

Pay for quality hosting with a reputable provider known for reliability.

With the right hosting and diligent optimizations, your website can grow smoothly for the long haul.