Photo by Stephen Phillips – Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash
Table of contents
- A server’s CPU, RAM, and proximity to users determine its speed
- SEO: The roles of Google’s CWV and crawl efficiency
- Loading speed is inversely proportional to bounce rates
A server’s CPU, RAM, and proximity to users determine speed
A server’s processing power significantly impacts the speed at which it handles requests. Faster CPUs with more cores can process data more efficiently, improving the server’s response time.
Two to four cores are sufficient for a small business website or a simple website in general. Four to eight cores are better for dynamic websites that rely on database queries, user authentication, and real-time data processing. Media sites and ecommerce platforms will need 8-16 cores.
Sufficient RAM allows a server to handle more concurrent processes without slowing down. 8GB of RAM is recommended for casual computer use and internet browsing, 16GB for office programs, and 32GB or more for gaming and multimedia creation.
Servers with SSD storage offer significantly faster read and write speeds than traditional HDDs. SSDs also run applications faster. The read/write process is conducted at 50–250 MBps, compared to 0.1–1.7 MBps for HDD. The platter rotation speed is what limits HDD speed. The maximum rotation speed is 7200 revolutions per minute, which makes HDDs slower.
The closer a server is to a user, the less time it takes for data to travel back and forth. A CDN caches website content across locations worldwide. It can reduce the distance between users and the server, ensuring that content is delivered more quickly, especially for websites people use worldwide. As of 2024, 45% of the top one million websites worldwide use a CDN or 454,415 websites.
As many websites using shared hosting share the same resources, response times slow down if the server becomes overloaded. That said, fast shared hosting is more than sufficient for a blog or a small website just starting out. If the site experiences a sudden surge in traffic, it can overwhelm the server, leading to slower speeds or even downtime. The likelihood of this happening on a VPS server is also present.
While many other factors affect speed, let’s now examine how they impact SEO and user experience.
SEO: The roles of Google’s CWV and crawl efficiency
Google uses a set of metrics called CWV or Core Web Vitals to evaluate the user experience of a webpage. CWV components include Largest Contentful Paint, which measures how fast the main content of a page loads, and First Input Delay, measuring how long it takes for a page to become interactive. An LCP should be at least 2.5 seconds.
Page speed is a ranking factor for desktop and mobile searches. Slow-loading websites tend to rank lower than faster competitors, especially in mobile search results. 64% of internet users do searches on their mobile phones, compared to 35% of desktop users. Mobile traffic characterizes more than twice as many keywords. Fewer than 30% of mobile users click the first result in searches, while around 36% of desktop users do so.
Google has a “crawl budget,” or the number of pages the search engine will crawl on a website within a given timeframe. Slow server speeds can limit the crawl budget because Googlebot might struggle to retrieve pages efficiently.
It’s estimated that Google Adsbot, an AI-based digital marketing platform, consumes 50% of the crawl, i.e., as much as Googlebot. If Googlebot encounters delays or timeouts while crawling a website, some pages may not get indexed, leading to slower content updates or a lower search ranking. A slow site is likely to damage crawling considerably.
Loading speed is inversely proportional to bounce rates
If a page takes too long to load, users are more likely to leave the site before it finishes loading. Search engines perceive a high bounce rate as a sign that users aren’t finding what they are looking for, which can negatively affect rankings.
As of 2024, 47% of internet users expect a website to load in two seconds at most, and 40% would navigate away from a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Every ten-second load time delay results in a bounce rate growth of 123%. Mobile websites have a 51% bounce rate, making them the leader in this category. The maximum average bounce rate was 55% in February 2023. According to experts, the ideal bounce rate is 50%.
Daniel J. Morgan is the founder of Invidiata Magazine, a premier publication showcasing luxury living, arts, and culture. With a passion for excellence, Daniel has established the magazine as a beacon of sophistication and refinement, captivating discerning audiences worldwide.
