Most people overlook server response time when it comes to improving the speed of their page. However, SRT can play a crucial role in the ranking of your website. Nobody prefers using a site that takes minutes to load, so Google lists the fast sites before the slow ones.
SRT is the amount of time from when a client makes an internet request (e.g., visiting a web page) to when the server responds to that request.
With a fast website optimized for quick loading, your site will appear to load nearly instantly. Your web browser can trip out a few times a day, but a visitor should not experience a slow-loading site more than a few times per week. For some sites, such as a financial blog or a social networking site, every visit could take a long time, especially if you have hundreds of friends or clients who come to your site regularly.
How much does Server Response Time matter?
With a good server response time and an optimized site, your website will load almost instantly. The pages might take longer to load if you do not apply these two conditions to them.
The result will be less user experience, and ultimately your search engine rankings fill fall. For those who do not know, SRT is measured in TTFB or Time to First Byte. It means the time between an HTTP client making a request and receiving the first byte of its desired data. Well, talking about the time, most top-ranking pages take only milliseconds to load content.
Most people do not realize how much response time affects their website’s performance. Most of the time, webmasters tend to neglect this very important factor that might spell disaster to their business.
When we talk about page speed, the number one thing that most webmasters neglect is the fact that it’s not just the image resolution that makes a difference to the response time. It means that without taking this into account, you may still be getting a response, but it might take a long time for your page to load. The other ways of improving the page speed is using plugins like cms and srt.
Connection Between Website Speed And SEO
In most cases, the response time of your website plays a major role in how SEO friendly your website is. Many times, search engines look at the response time of a website first before anything else in a SERP.
With ever-advancing technology today, SEO has become more advanced than ever. Today, many SEO Experts use advanced tools and plugins to achieve page speeds of over 8ms – which is one of the reasons why you should be very careful with your website speed.
Some loading times that are considered good for SEO are:
- Less than 100ms is extraordinary.
- A speed between 100ms to 200ms is pretty good. In fact, Google PageSpeed Insights suggests keeping SRT under 200ms.
- The time between 200ms to 1 second is considered average, but not good.
- However, anything above 1 second cuts your chance of ranking well on search engines.
Overall, a slow site would mean a poor user experience, and your visitor would rather close your site and visit another page. So, now you know website speed and SEO are closely related.
If you want to improve your SRT, we have some tips for you.
- Check your server response time.
- Find the problem behind the slow speed.
- Follow the tips given below to improve the SRT.
How to check server response time?
Today more than ever before we need to know how to check server response time. We all want our sites to run fast and efficiently all the time. It’s important to not only make sure that all of our sites are running properly but that we’re also able to see what’s going on in the background so that we can deal with any errors as they arise.
There are several tools that you can use to check your SRT. Here are a few tools that you can use to check your SRT:
- GTMetrix
- Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI)
- Pagelocity
- Google Chrome Dev Tools
- Yslow
How to Improve Server Response Time?
Here are some of the ways on how you can get a good Server Response Time:
Check with your host
If you are looking to improve your website’s performance at a minimal cost, you should consider finding a fast dedicated host. Hosting is a relatively expensive service that most small businesses and enthusiasts can’t afford on their own. In this day and age, websites must be hosted within an efficient hosting environment. As your website grows in size, so do your needs for a fast dedicated host. To improve server time response, find a fast and dedicated host now!
Content Delivery Network
A Content Delivery Network can be seen as a technology that improves the performance of websites by improving the quality of the network that they are connected to.
The term Content Delivery Network refers to any type of network that enables content to be sent and received rapidly and efficiently. This technology can improve many aspects of website operation, both performance-wise and throughput-wise.
Reduce the script
Reduce your script’s execution time by migrating older pages to a single PHP file. Using this technique, you will be able to improve your overall response time.
PHP comes with a built-in tool called “omp” that you can use to transfer all files. Older pages are optimized using the OPC approach. You can also use “fcgi” script to optimize your older pages if they do not support the standard optimizations.
Optimizing the images
Using scripts to optimize and scale images is a great way to make your website respond faster. A large file size image, for example, can take a long time to download, so it will slow down the website user experience over time.
In addition to that, such a large image can take up valuable disk space, which means you’ll have to spend money to free up some space on your disk or just don’t use it at all. Scripts to compress images are especially useful if you are trying to sell an item through your website, as you can improve the speed of your checkout process by reducing the overall file size.
Use caching
If you use cache for your web application, it is essential to understand how and why it works. Many companies who are new to the concept of server-side technologies may not understand how and why to use the cache and thus will fail to benefit from its advantages. You can use plugins to enable caching without any coding on some CMS platforms.
Keep your CMS, plugins, and themes updated
If you want to keep your CMS, plugins, and themes updated with the most recent information, then it is best to update them manually. Most WordPress users do not have the knowledge or skills to keep their plugins and themes updated manually, so if you have any plugins that require regular updates, you should use a plugin that offers an automated system for updating the code.
It will allow you to keep your website up-to-date without spending a lot of time. You will also be able to save a lot of time by using a WordPress theme designer rather than a WordPress programmer.
Final Takeaway
Many companies are wondering if they can reduce server response time in any way, or if there is a “best” or a “reduce” approach to reducing response time. There are many considerations when choosing how to reduce the response time of your website, and while it’s often the case that reducing SRTis an easy solution to a problem, there are some problems that aren’t easy to solve. An internet application with thousands of customers requesting a page at a time will undoubtedly take some time to respond but speeding up an individual or company can certainly reduce the overall time the server takes to load a website.