Often, server response time doesn’t register as a significant concern for speeding up the pages’ load-time. Overlooking this crucial element of website development may impact your SEO scores since Google notes your page load time speed. Users don’t like waiting for hours to get their pages to load. More often than not, a slow page load time could drive people away from your website. Pingdom mentions that a slow load time correlates with a high bounce rate in many cases. While you can up your SEO ranking with companies like YEAH! Local to help you. If your page load time is low, you’ll still lose many opportunities. In this article, we’ll look at the ways that companies can address slow server response times.

Locate a CDN

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) provides companies with a set of geographically distributed servers that work alongside each other to deliver online content. Digital Hill notes that a CDN is an excellent investment towards speeding up your load times [https://www.digitalhill.com/blog/cdn-content-delivery-network-improve-website-speed/]. If you’re hyper-focusing on local content, then a CDN isn’t such a good idea. However, if you’re like most businesses and want to target much further afield, a CDN is an excellent idea. When you use a CDN, you ensure that site visitors get a great experience, no matter where in the world they may be located. The CDN will find the closest server to the visitor can route all the data through that point to make for a more efficient page load time.

Fast, Dedicated Hosting

While shared hosting is the norm for businesses, they tend to be plagued by loading time woes quite often. It’s far more viable to get fast dedicated hosting for your web page. The downside of a dedicated host is that most hosting companies charge a premium for the service. Before putting money on a dedicated host, make sure you investigate the load times and server speeds. Additionally, just like with a CDN, you should choose a hosting location that’s as close as possible to your core audience. If you’re trying to have a local presence and expect more visitors to come from your region, a host machine located as close as possible to your current location will work out well for you.

Serving is Only the Start

Load times are affected by several different factors. While you can significantly lower the load time by switching to a CDN or having a dedicated host, you could create a much faster loading web page if you perform some optimization of your website. Use caching to keep your website data cached on the server so that users don’t have to download every element multiple times. Additionally, you can use image optimization to make your images a smaller size. Small images load quicker, cutting down the load time of the page significantly.

Is Load Time Really That Important?

The response to this question depends on what you see as important. If your goal in running a website is to attract customers and convert them into buyers, then having a slow load time simply won’t do. You’re much more likely to get users leaving your website before all the elements load. Load times are an essential concern if you want people to visit your site. Even a few fractions of a second may mean the difference between a customer staying or leaving to visit a competitor’s site.