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As a blogger who likes to take my work seriously, I have started to closely investigate all aspects of my business, especially anything that impacts my blog traffic.

After all, we really need visitors to our website in order to thrive, right? Obviously it’s up to us to provide valuable, relevant content that encourages our visitors to stick around; however we need to get them there first.

As it turns out, the moment I made this my main goal in December 2017 – to increase my blog traffic – my numbers grew quite dramatically.

Before then, I had consciously opted to fly under the radar. Reason being: I was an author before I was ever a blogger. My goal during 2017 was to create an online shopfront whereby I could sell my books directly from my website. Previously they were only available to purchase from Amazon, iBooks via iTunes, Barnes and Noble and various other online bookstores, which suited me fine.

Back then, my traffic averaged around 1000 page views per month with little or no promotion. If my numbers ever rose above this number, like they occasionally did, my heart would start to palpitate because I knew the shopfront wasn’t complete. Bizarre right? Wanting to avoid web traffic? But that was honestly the case – I DID NOT want to court visitors until everything was perfect.

Fast forward to the end of 2017 and I was finally ready to embrace this new journey called blogging. No more secretly hiding my blog posts. So exciting I thought!

Thanks to my background in marketing and year-long study of effective blog traffic techniques (which resulted in the creation of my course BOOST YOUR BLOG TRAFFIC) my web traffic started to grow immediately.

My Google Analytics statistics were as follows:

October 2017 – 1.1K visits

November 2017 – 3.7K visits

December 2017 – 9.8K visits

January 2018 – 14.9K visits

But here’s the thing…sometime after the New Year I noticed that my web traffic started to stall.

My pages were taking forever to load and my bounce rate was increasing rapidly. I had what only a blogger could deem to be an emergency situation.

It took a while before the lightbulb went off: I obviously had an issue with my Web Hosting Provider (who I won’t name and shame but let’s just say they are one of Australia’s top hosting providers). Even though they insisted my plan could cope with this amount of incoming traffic (10K was nothing too crazy!) the Google Analytics numbers spoke the truth.

The next day I changed over to Siteground and my, oh, my, what a difference! My loading speed dropped IMMEDIATELY from a maximum 60 seconds (from NYC) to 4.87 seconds (from San Jose). My page views jumped back into action and continued to grow. My bounce rate dropped immediately. I feel like Siteground gave me the opportunity to take my blog and business to the next level.

OLD HOST VERSUS SITEGROUND -TESTING FROM MELBOURNE

BEFORE: Load Time 41.20 seconds

AFTER: Load Time 5.81 seconds

85% Improvement in speed!

OLD HOST VERSUS SITEGROUND -TESTING FROM NEW YORK CITY

BEFORE: Load Time 60 seconds

AFTER: Load Time 7.24 seconds

88% Improvement in speed!

OLD HOST VERSUS SITEGROUND -TESTING FROM SAN JOSE

BEFORE: Load Time 36.57 seconds

AFTER: Load Time 4.87 seconds

86% Improvement in speed!

PLEASE NOTE: I used Pingdom to test the speed of my website.  These tests were conducted the day before I switched over to Siteground and immediately after Siteground became my new web hosting provider.

What I love most about Siteground

• Super affordable – prices start from just $4.95 per month
• Daily backups
• Free domain name
• Free site transfer
• Free SSL certificate – I previously paid $100 to get one with the other host!
• Fantastic support – within minutes of entering a live chat, I will always have someone helping me until a resolution is reached

It’s pretty obvious that staying with my old web hosting provider would have negatively impacted my business.

Who seriously wants to stick around for 60 seconds waiting for a page to load? I don’t. So it isn’t reasonable to expect other people will look kindly upon my website when it is behaving in such an unpredictable, slow way. Changing over to Siteground was definitely the best business investment and move I ever made. I wholeheartedly can recommend them to anyone looking for a reliable and superior web hosting provider.

To check out Siteground click here. 

The post Why I Chose SITEGROUND (and you should too!) appeared first on Inspiring Life.