Is Your Website Hosted Close To Your Audience?

One of the most common concerns when it comes to hosting is the location of the server. How do you go about picking the perfect location for your website? Will the server location affect your site and in what way? What aspects should you put weight on?

How does server location affect website performance?

Server location does play a role in the performance of your website, particularly on how fast or slow it loads.

There are many things that affect load speed—things like themes, plugins, scripts, images and other files that need to load for the end user. The heavier the files are, the slower your site’s load speed is going to be.

Distance also affects how fast your site is going to load for the end user. The further he is from the server, the slower the site will load for him. Can you imagine the distance the data will travel through if the server is in Sweden and the end user is in India?

But you can’t be close to each and every one of your visitors, so what should be your criteria in choosing the best server location for your website?

Factors to consider when choosing server location

You will probably get visitors from all over the world. Or you might be serving a global audience. Whichever the case may be, it’s important to choose where your server is going to be located based on the following:

• Identify where your target audience is located.

Where is your audience located? How close is your website to your core target market? If you have visitors worldwide, identify where the largest section of your market is. Your website should load the fastest for them.

So if you’re in the US, make sure you have US hosting. If your target market is in Australia, you should not be hosting in the US, you should have a Sydney-based server. It’s best to host your website in the same geographic location as your target audience.

• Find a provider that offers multiple data center options.

If you have multiple target audiences, it’s possible to have your site distributed on different servers. So if you want to target Canada and Australia for example, then your website could be distributed in the data centers in both countries.

What happens to the rest of your visitors who are not a part of your target audience? Does it mean they will get less than optimal load speed?

You can still give them a great experience of your website by setting up Content Delivery Networks to cache your site’s data in different servers around the world. This will help give them relatively fast load speeds.

Do you want to know how fast or slow your site is loading? Do you need any help switching hosting that is close to your audience? We can help. Just reach out and get in touch with us at [email protected].