Server Speed - What Matters and How to Measure It?

Server speed is key to success on the internet. It forms the foundation for a positive user experience and optimal SEO performance. Conversely, long loading times lead to frustration, bounces, and poor conversion rates. This article explains what matters in server speed, how it is measured, and what measures can be taken to optimise it.

What does Server Speed mean?

Server speed refers to the performance and efficiency of a server in processing requests and delivering data. It is a crucial factor for user experience and the overall performance of a website or online application.

There are various aspects of server speed that influence the overall performance of a server:

• Response Time (Server Response Time): The time taken by a server to respond to a request. A fast response time is crucial to ensure users do not have to wait long for pages or applications to load.
• Load Time: The time taken for a website to fully load. This includes the time from sending the request to the complete rendering of the page in the user's browser.
• Throughput: The number of requests a server can handle in a specific time period. Higher throughput means the server can handle more requests simultaneously, which is particularly important for high-traffic websites.
• Latency: The delay between sending a request and the server beginning to process it. Lower latency leads to faster response times.
• Processing Time: The time taken by a server to complete a specific task, such as retrieving data from a database or generating a dynamic page.

There are various factors that influence server speed:

• Hardware: The performance of the processor, memory, and hard drives plays a crucial role in server speed.
• Software: The operating system, web server software, and other applications on the server, as well as their optimisation, can significantly affect performance.
• Network: The server's network connection, geographical location, and network congestion also have a significant impact on load times.

Tip: Learn about Measuring, Comparing, and Optimising CPU Performance on VPS Hosting and Measuring, Comparing, and Optimising Disk Performance on VPS Hosting

How to Measure Server Speed?

Server speed can be measured using various methods and tools, each assessing different aspects of server performance.

Why is Server Speed So Important?

The reason is simple: human impatience. Pushing people's patience to the limit can have very negative and far-reaching consequences.

The key question: How long is too long? The answer is quite alarming: Google found in a study that the likelihood of users bouncing from a website increases by 32% after just 3 seconds of waiting. With a 5-second wait, the likelihood of bouncing increases by 90%.

This applies primarily to website loading times, i.e. the performance of a website. However, the same principle applies to all other computer applications where users are waiting for a result.

Impacts on Websites

When it comes to website loading times, the impacts are significant. Longer loading times lead to more users bouncing, a decrease in impulse purchases, and ultimately a loss of valuable traffic. This, of course, also affects the revenues of the website. Greg Linden of Amazon explains: 100 ms of additional loading time results in a 1% loss in revenue.

Another crucial factor is that Google uses loading times as an important ranking factor. Therefore, pages with long loading times are ranked lower. Consequently, the site is less discoverable, which in turn has a negative impact on the website's revenues.

For a comprehensive article on Pagespeed and the role that hosting providers and data centres play in data transmission, click here.

Discover the advantages that HTTP/2 and the upcoming HTTP/3 bring to web hosting and response times here.

Impacts on Other Applications

For other applications where users send data to a server and wait for a response (e.g. hosted applications in a corporate network), the impact of poor server performance is quite similar: frustrated users and a very poor user experience.

Especially in work processes, another factor comes into play: the enforced interruptions during the server response time cause a working user's thoughts to wander, leading to a loss of concentration. This ultimately slows down work processes and reduces the individual employee's work speed. When these effects are aggregated across all employees, a significant loss of performance can be observed in the company - and noticeable speed reductions in handling business cases - which can have a very negative impact on the company's market position (customer satisfaction, service level, competitiveness).

Even in non-professional applications, such as games on game servers, user satisfaction decreases noticeably due to long server response times.

How to Improve Server Speed?

The most crucial factor for server speed is, of course, the quality of hosting. This can vary significantly from data centre to data centre - not all places offer top performance.

The type of hosting also plays a role in the performance and speed of data transfer within the data centre. Those using a Dedicated Server for compute-intensive applications will generally expect better performance than someone using Shared Web Hosting in the same data centre. Before looking for a new hosting provider or switching data centres, it is advisable to first assess the performance of the chosen hosting if you wish to improve data transfer speed, reduce loading times, or shorten server response times.

Improve Pagespeed

To improve the loading times of websites, there are many things that can be done. Technical optimization is the second important part of all on-page optimization, alongside content optimization. Optimizing the loading time is an important aspect.

One strategy could be to reduce the amount of required data transfer as much as possible to improve performance. This can be achieved by using Lazy-Loading strategies or by caching large, frequently needed, and unchanging data packets (e.g. large images). The use of various Pagespeed tools can often lead to significant improvements.

Measures for other servers

To reduce data transfer speed and shorten loading times for applications, you can also:

• use a PHP Accelerator
• cache more content (e.g. by using Varnish Cache)
• take measures to improve database speed (e.g. MySQL)
• increase memory in servers
• optimise image files (e.g. with compression methods like Gzip or Brotli)
• increase disk speed
• store user profile data in local computers in corporate networks

Depending on the server used and the applications in use, there are always numerous ways to improve server performance (sometimes significantly). These opportunities should be maximised as much as possible - as server speed has a truly outstanding importance in almost all areas in the end.

Our article is based on our own experiences and research as well as information from external sources.

Article update:
Update 07.06.24: Content updated and expanded.

Sources & further links on the topic:
https://jmeter.apache.org/ (Open-source tool for running load tests)

Image credit:
Gerd Altmann on Pixabay