Speed matters for webhosting more now than it ever has in the past. After all, a website that loads quickly is more satisfying to a human visitor. Because the search engines are constantly trying to produce better results (results that humans find more satisfying) they are now measuring the speed of websites and factoring them into their rankings. A fast website ranks better than a slow one.
The speed of your website depends on many things. Obviously, it depends on how fast the server that your website is hosted on is. If you are on a shared server, sometimes your web site will get slowed down by another rogue site on the server. A good webhost has technology in place to keep this kind of interference to a minimum. However, bad web hosting companies sometimes overcrowd their shared servers, and this results in constant page load issues and slow response times.
In addition to the speed of your web server, there are other factors too. Don’t always assume that changing web hosting companies will make your website faster. Sometimes the speed of your website is completely dependent on the software you use to power your site (such as WordPress). Out dated software can cause your website to get very sluggish. Updating your CMS and any plugins on a regular basis is important.
