In Bali, a common situation is the following. The owner opens the business website on the office computer, and it loads well. The server may be in Singapore, and the connection is performing well that day. When the same page is tested from London, however, it can take a considerable time to load.
Guests are not in the shop. They are in Zurich, Perth or Toronto, on a hotel connection or a laptop at home, deciding whether to book with you or with a competitor nearby. The speed at which the site loads for them is the only speed that matters, and very few businesses here check it.
Why does the customer's location matter?
Dive centres in Indonesia sell almost entirely to people who live elsewhere: Europe, Australia, North America and parts of Asia. These customers find them months before the trip and make their decision on a screen at home.
Meanwhile, the owner checks the site from the shop. If it loads, the matter is closed. If it is slow, the island's internet connection is blamed, which is often justified.
Many of the dive websites we review are hosted on inexpensive local plans chosen through personal connections. Others are on large American shared hosts, with hundreds of other sites on the same machine. A few are well configured. Most display very large photos taken directly from the camera and placed on the page at full size, because the underwater images are striking and no one wants to reduce them.
The result is a page as heavy as a small photo album, served from the opposite side of the world. The guest in Germany waits, loses interest and returns to Google.
Where should a website be hosted?
Close to your customers rather than close to your office. Distance still matters on the internet. Every request from a browser to a server must travel there and back, and a page can make dozens of requests. Between Europe and a server in Southeast Asia, these round trips accumulate. Visitors experience this as a half-second pause before the page begins to display, followed by another, and another.
The first principle is therefore straightforward: place the server where most of your paying customers are. For a dive centre with mostly European guests, a quality host in Europe usually outperforms an inexpensive local one. For a centre whose guests are mainly Australian, Sydney or Singapore is more appropriate.
This may seem obvious, yet the error is common, because businesses often choose a host as they would a plumber, based on proximity and availability.
Google has also stated since 2010 that site speed is one of the factors it considers when ranking pages. In our assessment, it is a minor factor. A slow site, however, first loses impatient visitors, and the effect on ranking compounds the loss.
How does a CDN improve speed?
The second measure provides most of the improvement: a CDN, or content delivery network. It stores copies of your files (mainly images, scripts and style sheets) on servers located around the world, and serves each visitor from the nearest one. The guest in Zurich receives your photos from a server in Europe, and the guest in Perth from one in Australia. Cloudflare offers a plain-language explanation, what is a CDN, for a concise overview.
CDNs are not new; large sites have used them for years. What has changed for small businesses is that they have become inexpensive or free. Cloudflare offers a free plan. After a few settings are changed at the domain registrar, a large part of the site is served from locations around the world. The work usually takes an afternoon, much of it spent waiting for the settings to take effect.
A CDN does not compensate for unoptimized images, however. A five-megabyte photo delivered from a nearby server is still a five-megabyte photo. The other half of the work is to resize and compress every image before uploading it. No page requires a photo 4,000 pixels wide when it is displayed at 800. Photoshop's Save for Web function handles this, as do many free tools.
This work is routine, but on most of the sites we review, it offers the largest available speed improvement.
How can site speed be measured from several countries?
The third principle is the one most often overlooked: do not test only from your own desk.
Free tools load your page from a test machine in another city and show what happens, request by request. We use WebPageTest because it allows the test location to be selected. Load the site from London, then from Sydney, then from a location in the United States, and compare the results. Google's PageSpeed Insights is also useful for its list of recommended corrections. The first test of one's own site from another country is often revealing.
Which measurements should be reviewed?
- The time before anything appears on the screen.
- The time before the main photo and the headline are visible.
- Which files are the heaviest (almost always the images).
- Whether the results vary significantly from one country to another.
If London is fast and Sydney is slow, the cause is distance, and a CDN or a better-located host will resolve it. If the site is slow everywhere, the cause lies in the site itself.
How do phones affect site speed?
A growing number of guests view dive websites on a phone or tablet, often on a mobile connection while travelling. Mobile networks are slower and less tolerant than home connections, and a page that is merely slow on a laptop can become unusable on a phone.
All of the measures above therefore matter even more: lighter pages, served from nearby and tested from where customers actually are. If your site is not yet designed to work on a small screen, that is the next step, but reducing page weight should come first.
For professional support with web hosting choices or technical SEO, an outside review can help. You can, however, begin today with a free testing tool and ten minutes. Load your own site from three countries and review the results. It is the quickest way to see your site as your customers do.