In the fast-moving modern world, speed is everything. So getting your website up-to-speed is essential for its immediate and long-term success. Find out more about the impact of your website speed and data center location, and what you can do to optimize and get faster.
Understanding page speed
What is page speed?
This is how long it takes for a webpage to be viewable and fully functional for website visitors. People may think that page speed is the time the webpage loads and is interactive for the user, without accounting for some non-essential features, such as animations.
Page speed is determined by various factors, some of which involve the technology and network used. The website owner can also control some factors, such as by gaining useful insights from various tools.
The impact of page speed on user experience
User engagement
Naturally, high page speed is an advantage — it keeps your users engaged and improves their experience, so they’re more likely to stay on your website for longer. In the case of an e-commerce platform, faster page speeds will increase the chance of repeat visits from potential customers, which in turn improves sales.
User experience
When websites are immediate and everything functions smoothly and without any effort, the user can enjoy the experience and focus solely on what the website brings them. Faster page speeds mean happier website visitors — and first impressions can make all the difference.
What website load speeds change
When a website is taking too long to load, this is one of the factors that will cause visitors to leave without interacting or taking action. A site that loads faster has a better chance of increasing its retention rate, as fewer will abandon the site after viewing just one page.
Bounce rate
The bounce rate is the number of visitors that leave your site without taking any action — so it’s definitely something you want to keep to a minimum. When you have slower page speeds your bounce rates are higher, with bounce probability increasing 32% as page load time goes from one to three seconds. As page delays go from one to ten seconds, bounce rates increase by 123%.
Conversion rate
Slow-loading websites will also negatively impact conversion rates, which could be in subscriptions, signing up to a newsletter, making a purchase, or other actions the visitor can take. If your website is faster, users are more likely to take action, which will increase your conversions.
Time on site
When your website loads faster, it also means that more users will stay on the site longer and explore more pages. Slow loading speeds lead to shorter visits, so your stats will show the overall time spent on site to be lower.
Mobile usability
Website loading speed is even more important on mobile devices, because users expect faster, more seamless experiences. Slower speeds on a phone or tablet could mean users stop interacting with a site — something that could be made worse by varying mobile network conditions.
Website credibility
It’s common to associate a website’s speed with its professionalism and credibility. Fast-loading websites are seen as more modern and reliable, while slower websites can seem outdated or untrustworthy — this affects how users see your brand.
Impact on website ranking
Google’s ranking algorithm relies heavily on page speed, and for your website this directly influences the position in search results. Pages that load faster have a better chance of ranking higher on Google, which improves visibility and drives more organic traffic.
The data travel flow
Let’s imagine a user types spaceship.com into the browser bar. In less than three seconds the page will load up, but what makes it appear so quickly?
Let’s explore what happens behind the scenes.
When you enter the URL address, the request needs to access the hosting server where information is stored — this is the DNS request. The server is where your website is stored, and this is where data center location is important.
If a CDN service is set up for the domain, each new search is served by edge points (servers that cover the CDN network) and the closest CDN server powers DNS information and website content.
What impacts speed?
There are several key factors that can impact how quickly a user will see the web page, so let’s dive in.
Loading time
This is the time it takes a webpage's content to be fully displayed in the user's browser after going through a link or entering a URL in the search bar. This includes the time to download HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and other resources on a website.
Latency
This is the delay from when a user sends a request from a web application or network to when a response is received. In terms of website speed, it's the time taken for data to travel between your server and the device of the website visitor.
Server response time
On the server level, things like bandwidth, performance, user settings, and optimization make a big difference to the visitors — of course, they prefer websites to respond quickly. These responses are also faster when the server is geographically closer to the website visitors.
Server response time is a crucial factor in determining website speed. It is how long it takes a web server to process a request and send a response back to the user's browser. Slow server response time directly leads to slower page load speeds.
That means it’s more important to select a hosting provider with reliable servers located in data centers closer to your audience. You can use the traceroute command to check the speed of your connection to the server.
Hosting environment
Key server hardware and software components have a significant impact on website speed:
- CPU: A powerful server and processor handles requests more efficiently and reduces load times.
- RAM: Ensures the server can process multiple requests simultaneously.
- Storage: Fast storage solutions like SSDs make more performance improvements than traditional hard disk drives (HDDs).
- Web server software: Particular software, such as Apache or Nginx, may be better suited to different cases.
Content delivery network (CDN)
CDN services improve performance by delivering content faster to your audiences in every global location, which means you can get the best website loading time for all your visitors. CDNs use intermediary servers to get closer to audiences in different geographical regions and effectively deliver the content faster.
Common causes of slow page speed
Incorrect choice of data center location
As previously mentioned, choosing hosting for your website with a datacenter that’s closer to your target audience can have a positive impact on your latency and load times.
For example, if most of your website visitors are based in South Asia, it would be better to pick a data center location in the region, such as shared hosting in Singapore.
Heavy or unoptimized content
Content with large file sizes, such as images or videos can be a burden to your website by increasing the data that’s transferred through the web. Content that isn’t optimized adds to this, leading to slower loading times for your website.
The same applies to code, and overloading websites with heavy or unoptimized plugins and tools can slow loading times.
Practical tips for improving page speed
By improving page speed, you improve user experience, search rankings, and overall site performance. A fast-loading website helps keep our visitors engaged, which can lead to higher conversions.
Here’s how to get your site working as quickly as possible:
Get a data center location closer to your audiences
When hosting providers offer plans with multiple data center locations, it’s better to choose a location in the global region where most of your audience is located. This is one way of optimizing your speed potential, among other measures.
There is also the option to select a local hosting provider, but this should be decided on other factors like pricing, security, flexibility to customize, and customer support — in addition to data center location.
Choose the right hosting provider and plan
Make sure you pick a hosting provider that meets your technical requirements and has good overall metrics. It’s better to choose a plan that offers unmetered bandwidth, SSD storage, and servers with cloud technology, as this can help achieve optimal speed.
Use a content delivery network (CDN)
If you have audiences in different global regions, it could be a good idea to get a reliable CDN service for optimal speeds. CDNs also help deal with traffic surges and reduce the risk of threats like distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Caching
An important process in ensuring high speed, caching is a technique used to store frequently accessed data locally. This means that data is closer to the user's device, so caching reduces the time to fetch it from the server on every request, which means faster speeds.
Caching can be completed by the browser, on the server side, or the CDN. Browsers store static resources like images, CSS, and JavaScript files locally, so for future visits they can be loaded directly from the user's device and don’t need to be retrieved from the server.
Web servers cache dynamic content, such as database queries or frequently-used templates, so processing time used to generate content for each request can be reduced. CDNs also use caching to improve load times and reduce latency by serving content from the CDN server closest to the user.
You can optimize all types of caching by setting appropriate cache headers and compressing assets.
Optimize files and code
Introduce techniques that compress and resize content without losing quality. Remove unnecessary plugins and optimize the ones that are right for the needs of your website.
Minimize HTTP requests
Look for ways that you can reduce the number of requests a browser makes. You can achieve this by reducing your use of heavy content, combining files, and using “lazy loading”, which delays the loading of resources or objects until they’re needed by the user.
Get closer… and faster
Speed is essential for the running of any website. The good news is that there are measures you can take to make your website more efficient and direct, simply by adjusting, customizing, and selecting the right services. It’s always advisable to make best use of the resources available to you, so wherever you are in the world, you can be more local for your website visitors.
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