The Idiot’s Guide to Hosting Server Speed

Admit it. Gone are the days of dial-up internet and hence, our patience to wait has become shorter over time! This includes waiting for a website to load. How long are you willing to wait for a website to load? I’m sure most of us hopes that it finished loading immediately after we clicked in. That’s just an ideal situation. There are some websites that took longer than usual to load and we felt like we’ve wasted so much time waiting. As a person with IT background (I graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science), let me share one important factor that can contribute to the success of your blog/website. People often say “Content is King”. Yes, it’s so very true. If your content is relevant, Google will rank your article and people will come to your site. While “Content is King”, don’t forget that “Speed is Queen”. Do you know that with every additional second your site takes to load, it increases the bounce rate of your visitors? According to research data by Google, 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if the site takes longer than 3 seconds to load. That’s a lot of visitors! Below is an infographic by Google on Mobile Page Speed Benchmark:

After seeing all these, I’m sure you know how important your website speed is. The speed of your website is affected by many factors which includes hosting server speed, size of your images, code, plugins, caching, and many more. Let’s talk about one of the major factors – hosting server speed. In layman term, hosting server is the place that houses your website contents including codes and multimedia (images/videos). If your hosting server is having limited resources, bad quality network or using low spec hardware, it will affect your website loading time. That means, no matter how optimized your website is, it will ultimately use a longer time to load.

Bitcatcha Server Speed Checker

I’m currently using this FREE Online Tool called Bitcatcha Server Speed Checker to test my hosting server speed. Instead of the usual website speed checkers out there, this one tests specifically the fundamental of your website speed.

All you need to do is key in your website URL and click on the search icon to start testing. Behind the scene, your hosting server will be evaluated using reliable servers in 10 locations worldwide which are Los Angeles, New York, London, Sao Paolo, Bangalore, Singapore, Japan, Sydney, Canada, and Germany. According to Google’s benchmark, server response time should be 200 ms. After comparing your server’s speed against the ideal speed, Bitcatcha will assign a rating to it so you know the quality of your hosting server, just like exam grading. Ideally, your server response speed should be B+ and above or at least C+. Network stability might affect the result. Hence, it is advisable to run the test for at least 3 times. If you found that the result is still unfavorable, identify the locations where your server doesn’t perform well. If the majority of your audiences come from the affected locations, it’s a priority to resolve this issue by either talking to your current hosting provider or switch to a better one. If unresolved, you risk losing your readers and/or potential customers!

Phew… kinda relieved to find out that the response time in Singapore is pretty low. Since my readers are mostly from Malaysia and Singapore, I guess I’m safe. Feel free to also check out some tips from Bitcatcha to speed up your server. I think they put a lot of effort into curating useful contents for online business owners and bloggers. I find myself reading one article after another. Hope you’ll find my sharing this time useful as well 🙂