Server Location Matters More Than You Think for Website Speed

Server Location Website Speed
  1. Why Website Speed is Important
  2. How to Check & Monitor Your Website Speed
  3. How Websites Slowdown
  4. Optimizing Static Vs Dynamic Sites
  5. How Hosting Affects Your Website Speed
  6. Server Location Matters More Than You Think for Website Speed
  7. Optimize Images
  8. Why You Should Always Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  9. Offload Audio & Video Files
  10. Lazy Websites are Fast Websites
  11. Yes, Your Theme Can Affect Site Speed
  12. WordPress Plugins: Quality over Quantity

The internet feels like a place where your location doesn’t matter. We’re used to seeing content & interacting with people from around the world. And no matter where you are online it feels like every site is equally close.

One concept that might surprise new website owners is that the location of your web server matters. I live in Denver Colorado and if I want to access a web server in Denver it’s going to be much faster than one in Europe, South America, or Asia.

To illustrate this let’s do some speed tests around the world. My web server is in South Carolina. On the east coast of the US. So let’s test our site with a couple of different locations to see how much it could help.

I’ll be using the KeyCDN speed test since they make it really easy to test locations.

  • New York – 800 ms
  • London – 1.59 s
  • Bangalore – 3.12 s
  • Tokyo – 3.85 s
Server location response delay

If your server is a half continent away it could add a 1/2 second easy. If it's on the other side of the world it could add 1-2 seconds.

My advice to you is to make sure your webserver is located in the same continent as your audience – or the largest chunk of your audience.

Since I’m catering to a US audience with my site I’m very happy where I am and don’t need to change anything. If you are thinking about moving server locations first ask your host because they likely have a server location closer to your customers and it’s much easier to move between data centers than to setup a whole new hosting account.

How Hosting Affects Your Website Speed

Why Hosting Matters
  1. Why Website Speed is Important
  2. How to Check & Monitor Your Website Speed
  3. How Websites Slowdown
  4. Optimizing Static Vs Dynamic Sites
  5. How Hosting Affects Your Website Speed
  6. Server Location Matters More Than You Think for Website Speed
  7. Optimize Images
  8. Why You Should Always Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  9. Offload Audio & Video Files
  10. Lazy Websites are Fast Websites
  11. Yes, Your Theme Can Affect Site Speed
  12. WordPress Plugins: Quality over Quantity

When people talk about optimization they usually focus on the front end. That means focusing on things like the HTML code, combining CSS files, deferring JavaScript files, and optimizing images. These are all very useful techniques but they're also the easiest techniques to implement.

It’s important to remember that hosting directly affects the initial page load. And it's worth investigating even if it is incredibly time-consuming and possibly expensive to change.

Continue Reading…

Optimizing Static Vs Dynamic Sites

Static vs Dynamic Sites
  1. Why Website Speed is Important
  2. How to Check & Monitor Your Website Speed
  3. How Websites Slowdown
  4. Optimizing Static Vs Dynamic Sites
  5. How Hosting Affects Your Website Speed
  6. Server Location Matters More Than You Think for Website Speed
  7. Optimize Images
  8. Why You Should Always Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  9. Offload Audio & Video Files
  10. Lazy Websites are Fast Websites
  11. Yes, Your Theme Can Affect Site Speed
  12. WordPress Plugins: Quality over Quantity

I love talking about speeding up WordPress websites. But before we go any further it's important to know that there are two broad types of sites:

  1. Static
  2. Dynamic

And before we optimize things left & right you should know that some techniques work really well for one type of website and won't work for the other type.

Continue Reading…

How Websites Slowdown

How Websites Slowdown
  1. Why Website Speed is Important
  2. How to Check & Monitor Your Website Speed
  3. How Websites Slowdown
  4. Optimizing Static Vs Dynamic Sites
  5. How Hosting Affects Your Website Speed
  6. Server Location Matters More Than You Think for Website Speed
  7. Optimize Images
  8. Why You Should Always Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  9. Offload Audio & Video Files
  10. Lazy Websites are Fast Websites
  11. Yes, Your Theme Can Affect Site Speed
  12. WordPress Plugins: Quality over Quantity

Speeding up your website is exciting but before you start adding a caching plugin to your site it’s good to think about the whole process of building a web page. Because each part of building and rendering a web page can be done efficiently and fast OR inefficiently and slow.

Continue Reading…

How to Check & Monitor Your Website Speed

How to Check & Monitor Your Speed
  1. Why Website Speed is Important
  2. How to Check & Monitor Your Website Speed
  3. How Websites Slowdown
  4. Optimizing Static Vs Dynamic Sites
  5. How Hosting Affects Your Website Speed
  6. Server Location Matters More Than You Think for Website Speed
  7. Optimize Images
  8. Why You Should Always Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  9. Offload Audio & Video Files
  10. Lazy Websites are Fast Websites
  11. Yes, Your Theme Can Affect Site Speed
  12. WordPress Plugins: Quality over Quantity

One of my favorite things to do is collect data. I love collecting ALL the data because you never know when you need it and if you collect it you'll always have it when someday you could find a use for it. This brings me to one of my favorite quotes:

“What gets measured gets improved.”

Robin S. Sharma (inspired by Peter F. Drucker)

There’s some truth to this. And lucky for us website speed is easy to measure, breakdown, and analyze. And this is important because what works for one site might not work for another. So if you're looking to improve your site speed we always want to measure & confirm our sites are getting faster.

Continue Reading…

Why Website Speed is Important

Why Website Speed is Important
  1. Why Website Speed is Important
  2. How to Check & Monitor Your Website Speed
  3. How Websites Slowdown
  4. Optimizing Static Vs Dynamic Sites
  5. How Hosting Affects Your Website Speed
  6. Server Location Matters More Than You Think for Website Speed
  7. Optimize Images
  8. Why You Should Always Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  9. Offload Audio & Video Files
  10. Lazy Websites are Fast Websites
  11. Yes, Your Theme Can Affect Site Speed
  12. WordPress Plugins: Quality over Quantity

You've built a website – congratulations! Now you can venture on the eternal quest to optimize it (speed it up).

Why is website speed important? The one-sentence summary is: No one wants to wait

The less time people have to wait, the more time they have to browse your site and convert — whether that means filling out a lead generation form or checking out on your eCommerce store.

Continue Reading…

Announcing the Quantity vs Quality SEO Challenge

Announcing the Quantity VS Quality SEO Challenge

I’ve been working in the WordPress and online marketing world since 2009. In that time, I’ve seen little blogs and individual posts blow up and become big deals. 

I’ve also seen a more organized SEO research-driven approach at Nexcess, LinkedIn Learning, and WooThemes. 

Their process involves finding the perfect:

  • Keywords
  • Article Length 
  • Images 
  • Linking strategy

The goal is to increase a piece of content’s SEO value and draw more traffic — and the bigger the organization, the more strategies and tools are used.

Continue Reading…

Product Marketing Manager for Nexcess

Product Marketing Manager

It's a new year and I have a new job.

I'm proud to say I'm joining the Liquid Web / Nexcess team as a Product Marketing Manager for WooCommerce.

What A Product Marketing Manager Does

If you're in the IT space you might know what that person does – but more than likely you don't. So let me explain why I'm so excited.

A product manager (which is a different role) decides what to build and they make sure the engineering team does so. So after a product manager you will have a list of features.

  • Feature 1
  • Feature 2
  • Feature 3
  • Feature 4

Of course some features are more important than others so what a product marketing manager does is figure out which features we want to talk about, which ones we need to highlight, and which ones we need to highlight multiple times.

  • Feature 1
  • Feature 2
  • Feature 3
  • Feature 4
  • and don't forget Feature 2!

In short a product marketing manager helps with the strategy about how you speak about a thing. And I'll be talking about our Managed WooCommerce hosting.

Why I Got On Board

I've had a few conversations with hosting companies over the years and I've been tempted but never pulled the trigger. With Liquid Web / Nexcess they're doing something I'm really excited about and that are their new Managed WooCommerce hosting plans.

It's my 3rd week on the job and at the end of my 2nd week we launched our brand new plans.

Managed WooCommerce Hosting plans on Nexcess.net
Managed WooCommerce Hosting plans on Nexcess.net

Managed WooCommerce Hosting

In the WordPress world we've have Managed WordPress hosting for quite some time. I think I got my first managed hosting account back in 2012 or 2013. And they're great.

  • They update your plugins
  • They update WordPress
  • They proactively remove or patch plugins with security vulnerabilities
  • They optimize the speed & performance of your site
  • and a whole lot more

They turn WordPress from something you have to maintain into something that just works. And that's magical.

Liquid Web announced a Managed WooCommerce plan back in 2018 and they focused exclusively on speed & performance. They were amazing for established stores that have a bit of money to spend.

What's new is they just announced a $19/month entry level plan. This means for $20 a month you can run your own WooCommerce store and have Nexcess manage it for you. That means you can focus on your business while we take care of the boring updates.

What's the Deal with Nexcess / Liquid Web

You're probably a little confused about the difference between Nexcess and Liquid Web. The short story is Nexcess is now a Liquid Web brand and they're putting their Managed WordPress & Managed WooCommerce hosting under that brand.

In 2020 you'll see Liquid Web / Nexcess promoted at WordCamps and moving forward you'll likely see just Nexcess promoted at WordCamps.

New Challenges

I've been working for myself for 3 years and it's been great. I now get to work more closely with awesome people on the Liquid Web / Nexcess team. And I get to focus on what I do best.

I love articulating what people want and trying to write messaging for them. So I'm very excited for this next challenge.