reduce server response time

Speed It Up: How to Reduce Server Response Time for Your Website

Website Tips and Tricks

The slower your website loads, the more visitors bounce. The server response time for your website is a crucial factor in how Google scores your SEO, so make sure it is running optimally. This article shows you how to reduce server response time for your website.

Google likes to see websites with a server response time of, maximum, 200 milliseconds. Any longer and your SEO score will decrease. Google does not look at your server response time metric, but it does look at your bounce rate.

How to Reduce Server Response Time for Your Website

No matter if you run an Escape Room in Louisville, a butcher shop in Brooklyn, or a helicopter hanger in Huston-to be successful, you need a website that responds quickly. Your online presence is the best tool for finding new clients and building brand awareness.

Your average server response time directly relates to how many viewers interact with your page content. If users request your website without interacting with on-site content, Google counts it as a bounce. The higher your websites bounce rate the worse it is for your SEO score.

If your site is down, it will not register a bounced requests. Determine if your site is “up” the majority of the time, or not, in order to narrow down the cause of your slow server response time.

Common Slow Server Response Time Factors

Four things contribute to your servers response time: viewer traffic, resource expenditure, software, and website hosting. If your site is down a lot, it is likely a hosting problem. But to reduce server response time for your website, optimize all of the following:

Website Traffic

You want a lot of people to visit your website, but it can become a problem if your server can’t handle the influx. It is a good problem, but a problem nonetheless. If your server is slow because of too much viewership traffic, upgrade your server storage space to accommodate.

Resource Expenditure

If you use a lot of resources on your websites UI/UX, there are fewer resources to handle website server requests. Things, like video sliders, graphic elements, and animated page transitions take up quite a bit of website processing resources.

This is an easy problem to fix, as long as you can live with fewer bells and whistles on your website. To optimize your WordPress sites resource usage, install LazyLoad for Videos and MaxCDN.

Software and Updates

No matter the type of Content Management System (CMS) your website is on, the software must be updated regularly. WordPress.org platform software is updated several times a month. If you have not installed the most recent OS software update, do so.

Plugins and website extensions also need updating in order to reduce server response time. Go back over all of the extensions installed on your website to determine which need updating, and which are obsolete.

Website Host

The web host service you use plays a big role in the capacity of your server and its response time. Cheap, low-quality web hosts stack up thousands of websites on the same server space allotment. If any website receives an influx of viewership traffic, site speed is decreased across the board.

The best affordable web hosting providers offer individual segments of server space, instead of stacked storage. If your website is getting more than 10,000 views a month, look into private website hosting or cloud hosting.

Final Thoughts

If problems still persist consult our blog for more information and services on reducing website lag. And, if you know someone who will find this article useful, on how to reduce server response time, share it with them on social media. Thanks for reading!