Ecommerce Web Hosting: The Ultimate Checklist
Your website is the storefront for your ecommerce business, so it’s essential to invest in a quality web host that specializes in ecommerce.
While customers can’t see your web hosting solution, it has a considerable impact on user experience and affects your website’s security.
Unfortunately, not all ecommerce website hosting solutions are created equally, so it’s important to shop around for a quality solution. Here are a few things you should look for in an ecommerce web hosting provider.
Automatic Backups
The ecommerce hosting plan you choose should come with automatic backups. If you purchase a basic plan, you may have to pay extra for automatic backups, though it usually comes free with more advanced plans.
Automatic backups are essential because if the website crashes, all unsaved data will be lost. For example, if your website is automatically backed up on Monday and your website crashes on Wednesday, you’ll still have access to all the data that existed Monday.
Therefore, if your website changes often, you may want to check the frequency in which your website is updated with your ecommerce hosting plan.
Responsive Customer Support
It's essentially impossible for a web host to offer a 100 percent uptime guarantee, so it's important to have a responsive team when your website does go down. They should be communicative with you when their servers are experiencing outages and give you an estimate of when it will be live again.
Additionally, you may want assistance when renewing your hosting plan or troubleshooting, so read reviews and try out their 24/7 support.
Stellar Performance
The best ecommerce hosting solutions prioritize speed and performance. Statistics show that more than half of all mobile users will leave a website that takes longer than three seconds to load, so your web host has a huge impact on site speed.
The other aspect of performance that web hosting impacts is uptime. Uptime is how often your website is live, and it should be close to the industry average is 99.9 percent. Any percentage lower than that will cause your website to be down for extended periods of time and result in poor user experience.
Quality Security
The web hosting solution you choose also has a significant impact on your website's security. Similar to a brick-and-mortar store robbing, your online store could be hacked, compromising all of the credit card information from your customers.
This security breach is detrimental to a brand's reputation. A study by KPMG showed that 19 percent of customers would never shop with the compromised brand again, and an additional 33 percent of customers would stop shopping there for an extended period of time.
To check your hosting provider's ecommerce security protocols, ask how they physically secure their servers, and be sure they offer SSL certificates and security against DDoS attacks.
The Bottom Line
Ecommerce stores are steadily rising in popularity, and the COVID-19 pandemic is solidifying their popularity. However, the increasing popularity of ecommerce stores also results in a rise in competition. Therefore, it's more important than ever to have a strong, secure website, and choosing the best ecommerce web hosting plan can help you achieve your website performance goals.
