How fast is your website
There is no speed limit on the Internet. In this hyper-connected world where everyone wants access all the time, high-speed connection is “a must for Homo communicus.”
We can satisfy our need for speed with fiber optics and 5G networks. There are no radar guns on these highways. Websites should pay their respects to such connective debauchery.
Loading time
To serve users and not keep them waiting, effective websites must be fast. Google and all the search engines carefully measure this response time. The faster the website, the higher the ranking! That’s the reward for speed.
Rich content, pristine SEO copywriting and sleek visuals are not enough to boost your audience numbers. Your websites have to be lightning fast on phones and computers alike!
Before now, dynamic websites with exciting well-illustrated content were usually slower than static websites with pitiful designs and low-res images.
So it seemed like the speed Google praised was inversely proportionate to the quality of the website. Apparently, the two couldn’t coexist.
Yet, speed has a vital objective. Google increasingly prioritizes website responsiveness. The quality of the user experience depends on it! Thus, to incentivize Web agencies to improve on this front, Google demotes the ranking for websites it deems too slow.
In praise of slow Web pages?
Have you read In Praise of Slow by Carl Honoré? The author asserts that some work takes time, that some projects demand long hours, and concludes that speed is not an end in itself.
However, the Web cannot indulge in the luxury of time because Internet users would invariably balk at lagging load times.
Case study
Loading speed
Guy A didn’t have to finish the book and, although the homepage of his online storefront is very light, Google ranked it 38/100 on phones and 60/100 on desktops. Guy B got more of the gist of In Praise of Slow with 12/100 on cell phones and 39/100 on desktops! Guy A uses a mainstream consumer hosting company and Guy B uses non-optimized standard servers chock-full of websites.
Now for us: Google ranks the homepage of Soweb.io as 65/100 on cell phones and 98/100 on desktops. The numbers don’t lie and neither does the impact of speed.
Le confrère A n’a pas du terminer le livre, avec la première page de son site vitrine, pourtant très légère, notée par Google à 38/100 pour les smartphones et 60/100 pour les ordinateurs. L’autre confrère B a mieux assimilé l’Éloge de la lenteur, avec un 12/100 en consultation mobile et 39/100 pour les ordinateurs ! Le premier utilise un hébergement mutualisé grand public et le second des serveurs standards, non optimisés et surchargés de sites.
De notre coté, Google note la première page du site Soweb.io à 65/100 pour les mobiles et 98/100 sur les ordinateurs. Les chiffres ne mentent pas et l’impression de vitesse non plus.
Desktop rank
Cell phone rank
High-end Sowebio servers
Sowebio owns and uses high-end servers located at four OVH data centers in Gravelines, Roubaix, and Strasbourg, France, and Frankfurt, Germany. Every server in our infrastructure has a 2 Gbit/s connection and all are linked to Sowebio’s private european network that also works at speeds of 2 Gbit/s.
All of the production servers hosting our client websites are equipped with the latest technology, from massively multicore processors, next-generation NVMe solid state drives, and ECC memory with automatic error correction.
But hardware isn’t everything. For the last five years, Sowebio has also been heavily investing in research and development, infrastructure, virtualization, automation and Web services optimization. And our clients can see the results. Their WordPress websites are some of the fastest on the Internet.
So it is possible to have your beautiful websites and surf at high speeds, too!
Like Star Trek, Sowebio hosting services “boldly go where no one has gone before” 😉