Factors Influencing Server Response

Time of your Website

From business owners to on-line marketers, having a website

that quickly loads or responds fast to the end-users means a lot

for their online success. Websites with reliable content, search

engine optimization and with relative speed provide a better user

experience ensuring higher conversion rates.

Understanding server response time

The time interval between the request sent from a user to the

web server and the server responding back to that request is

known as the “Server response time”. In simple words, the time

taken by the server for responding to the user's request. Here the

request sent is for HTML content (pages, images, files, etc.)

Server response is counted in milliseconds. The lower the count

of your server response time, the higher the page loading speed

you will have.

As per Google page-speed insight recommendations, optimal

server response time should be under 200ms.

To improve the server response time of a website make sure you

keep it under 200ms by resolving the performance issues like

slow database queries, insufficient memory, resource

availability, slow routing, server configurations etc.

Factors influencing server response time:

Overloaded Server

Too much web traffic dramatically slows down access to a

website. This is caused by more file requests sent by the users to

the server. If the server gets more requests than what it can

handle, then it will fail to function efficiently.

It happens due to over-selling of resources or a sudden traffic

spike causing server to slow down.

Insufficient server resources

When a website receives more traffic, it uses more server

resources (i.e., memory, disk space, bandwidth, processes) and

the web server finds it difficult to serve all the requests due to

insufficient availability of resources.

For displaying web pages, workload at server side is heavy. It

loads several style sheets, scripts and uses many resources:

which means, for viewing each web page, web server serves a

separate request.

The number of websites hosted on server also matters. A server

sharing all its resources (memory, processes, bandwidth, disk

space, etc.) equally with all the sites hosted on it may not fulfill

all the user requests at one time due to the usage of resources by

other websites.

This can be solved only when you increase the Server resources

(i.e. memory, processes, disk space and bandwidth).

CMS or other applications used for website

Some CMS software is used for different kinds of purposes. If

you use one kind of CMS software for a website that doesn’t

match its purpose, it might perform poorly during traffic spikes.

Example, Word-press sites on the web uses PHP. Most of these

pages have slow server response times because server follows

many steps in responding to a web request.

Few CMS applications are flexible and reliable. If you use these

kinds of applications for your website, it can dramatically slow

down your site performance.

Depending on the site you use for: whether CMS or e-

commerce platform, you need to check for new releases and

updates available for your site's script. If available, upgrade it for

newer versions to prevent your site's speed going down.

Updating your site scripts to the latest script versions help you in

eliminating coded roadblocks impacting site loading.

Web server configuration

Web server configuration matters a lot in processing the user

requests by the server. Based on the peak usage time of

websites, you need to deploy web server hardware that has

enough CPU and expandable RAM. This helps to cache the

most frequently needed pages and other files requested by the

users.

Without cache option, each time the user requests a file; CPU

needs to fetch files from the start.

As the CPU consumes more time for processing even recent

files, it slows down its performance in completing all the

requests. So systems with slower processors results in poorer

performance.

Systems with cache option saves on the amount of resources

used for your requests to display pages resulting in faster load

times.

So, choose a web server software configuration that handles all

the requests at a higher speed even at high web traffic load.

Quality of Web hosting

Web hosting providers play an important role in making your

website available all the time for your visitors online.

Depending on the type of your business website, go for a web

hosting provider that meets all your business needs even during

sudden traffic spikes.

Though you choose a web hosting plan that meets your business

requirements, your website sometimes goes down due to the

ordinary behavior of your web host.

Make sure that the space allocated for your website on a server

is enough that it will help in your business expansion and the

bandwidth allocation and meets your web traffic needs.

If you care about your website server response time, make sure

your web host provider does not oversell their servers. The more

websites they host on their servers, the slower will be the server

response time.

A quality web host will be available round the clock to support

and solve your queries. They will also advise you whenever

changes are required in your plan for up-gradations.

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