Page load speed has become a buzzword since Google announced a significant change how it ranks websites for mobile searches. Starting in July 2018, page speed will also be a ranking factor for mobile searches.
Speed ranking has already been used in ranking but focused on desktop. Now they turn to mobile searches. It’s a logical step as according to the Statista resource, Google accounted for about 94.4% of mobile search market share in the USA. So Google encourages you to think again about how your store performance affects a user’s experience and to consider its optimization.
One of the often-ignored page speed topics is web hosting. Upgrading web hosting can have a significant impact on page load speed, especially for resource intensive (i.e. lots of code and database queries to execute) websites. Let’s check the impact of upgrading from a basic shared hosting plan to a VPS plan has on page load speed for one of such websites. The VPS hosting offered a 62% improvement in website loading speed:
Why web hosting is so important?
When you browse to a website and load a webpage, you are essentially running programs on and opening files from a remote computer (the web server). The faster that remote computer is, the more quickly the webpage can be loaded. There are three basic tasks the web server has to complete:
- Execute code: In many cases, the web server has to execute thousands of lines of code (for example, the PHP code) to render a single webpage. Just like opening a program on your computer takes time, it takes time to execute all this code on the web server.
- Run database queries: For any CMS-based website, the website code will have to run database queries to retrieve the webpage content from a database (e.g. MySQL).
- Serve files: A typical webpage requires the web server to serve up dozens of files (images, CSS, Javascript, etc.). For example, loading the homepage of Amazon.com involves over 350 requests to the web server.
Optimizing for speed hosting ensures that these tasks are executed swiftly, resulting in a seamless and rapid browsing experience for users.
What makes some web hosting packages faster?
How do you pick out a web hosting package that will help improve your site’s page load speed? As it turns out, the factors that make a hosting package faster are very similar to the factors that make your own computer run faster:
- Dedicated resources: The first step is to choose a hosting plan that offers dedicated resources – this keeps other websites from hogging resources (e.g. processor and memory) from your website. Instead of choosing a shared hosting plan, choose a VPS.
- More resources: Having more available processing power and memory means your server can execute requests more quickly. (Just upgrading from shared hosting to dedicated will usually give you significantly more available resources.)
- Faster hard drive: A solid state drive (SSD) loads files much faster than a standard hard drive, resulting in faster performance.
- Local resources: Having your database and other resources directly on the web server can help improve performance vs. these resources being on another server as with some shared hosting packages.
You can check our plans of cloud hosting. There are dedicated resources (processor and memory) and SSD is included. If more resources are required, the upgrade to a higher level is possible.
Time to first byte
Recent studies have also shown correlations between webpage load speeds and time to first byte. They suggest “time to first byte” may be the page speed metric Google uses to influence rankings. Time to first byte isn’t influenced by front-end optimization tactics like minimizing JavaScript or optimizing image files. This is another reason to upgrade your web hosting – a faster web server, such as the full effect hosting, generally means a lower time to first byte.
At the end of it all, what matters is the speed of your site. With the greater connection between web speed and web hosting, there is no doubt that upgrading to a better web hosting plan guarantees better results and increase on ROI.
Sources:
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search.html
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/web-hosting-can-impact-page-load-speed/145547/
https://www.colocationamerica.com/blog/effect-of-web-hosting-on-load-speed
https://www.statista.com/statistics/511358/market-share-mobile-search-usa/