Does the website hosting location have an impact on website speed?
Yes. Your website hosting location has an impact on the website speed. If you have 60% visitors from USA, your website should be hosted in the USA rather than Singapore or Europe. In the same way, if the most visitors are from UK, you should choose UK or European location hosting. This is because of the network latency and TTFB.
What is Network Latency & TTFB?
Network Latency means the time to complete the data transmission from your browser to the server over a network. The longer the distance the data transmission take. The longer the distance the data must go, the longer it will take to reach its user. Network latency is typically measured in milliseconds; however, it could go up to seconds depending on the network.
On the other hand, the TTFB (time to the first byte) measures the amount of time it takes when a web browser sends a request to a server and when it receives its first byte of data. The longer the distance the data must go, the longer it will take to serve your website’s page.
We won’t get into all the technical aspects in this post; all you need to have in mind is that the network latency and TTFB should be as low as possible.
An effective way to achieve low latency & TTFB is to choose a server location closest to your visitors.
We will share some effective suggestions you can follow to select the most perfect hosting location for your website.
Check the geolocation of your visitors
First of all, you need to check the geolocation of your visitors. One of the easiest ways to check visitor’s location is to on your Google Analytics account.
To do that, log in to your Analytics account, and go to Audience → Geo → Location
You will find countries from where you are getting traffic. You can also choose your target country. Even if you are running a local business, you can choose the city where you are operating your business.
At the starting of this post, we mentioned that 60% visitors are coming from USA, so you should host your website in the US location server.
If you are targeting global audience, you can use CDN (Content Delivery Network) for your website. We will discuss about CDN later in this article.
Do a quick latency test
There are some fantastic tools to check latency from your current location to your hosting provider, like Ping, Traceroute or MTR ( a combination of Ping and Traceroute). This will evaluate which location can be best for your website. Keep in mind that, the lower the ping result, the better.
Do a quick TTFB test
You can check TTBF & web performance using KeyCDN Performance Test tool. With this amazing tool you can test from 14 locations around the world.
- Go to https://tools.keycdn.com/performance
- Insert your domain in the search bar
- Hit the Test button
Keep in mind that, the lower the TTFB result, the better.
There are some other free tools you can use to check TTFB such as GTmetrix or Pingdome. Here you will find TTFB as the wait time.
As per Google’s recommendation, any TTFB result less than 200 ms is ideal. 200-500 ms is considered as good.
Choose a server location closest to your visitors
If your target audience and maximum traffic is from Singapore and your website is hosted in Canada, You website data need to travel one-third of the globe to reach the end-user. That’s why you are always recommended to host your website to the closer location of your visitor. If you already did that and your website speed is still now slow, probably you should consider changing your web hosting provider.
At VernalWeb, we have 3 different data centers across the world from where you can choose your hosting location.
- USA
- Canada
- Singapore
This allows you to host your website close to your target visitors. This will help you create a fast website.
Is there any way to reduce latency?
If you are targeting global visitors for your website, CDN (Content Delivery Network) is very effective way to get low latency. A CDN stores your website static content in different data center location around the globe and delivers the content to the user from its closest data center. No matter where your visitor comes from, your website will load very quickly to that user.
VernalWeb has partnered with CloudFlare, a global CDN company and all our hosting plans include free CDN service. Using Cloudflare CDN, your website loading time will reduce significantly and you will get excellent performance.
Summery
Website loading speed matters a lot in case of web performance and customer satisfaction. No one loves a slow website, right? Choosing a good hosting service close to your target audience will ensure fast loading speed & increase your web presence.
If you are thinking of moving your website to server location closest to your visitors now is the moment. We are offering free website migration with our all hosting plans.
