Everyone needs a fast website. If your website makes people wait, you not only lose business from potential customers but also stand a chance to reduce search engine visibility. Which in turn drastically hampers your website’s discoverability. Nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 3 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 4 seconds. Page speed becomes a lot more important during critical situations like payment transactions. 44% of online shoppers say that slow online transactions make them anxious about the success of a transaction.
Now that we know how important is website loading time. The million dollar question is however, how to drastically improve your page load time. Your crusade towards blazing fast page speed starts with your website hosting package. Let’s face it, if the system that serves your website resources is not geared up for speed optimization, the overall page load time cannot be improved beyond a point. Lots of website owners and webmasters have come to realize this and are making more informed choices of selecting website hosting packages.
It is observed that many people are moving to Cloud Hosting Services. This is because of the way Cloud Hosting services are structured and how it can greatly benefit page load time. In a nutshell, instead of having a single server take care of all tasks, Cloud Hosting platforms distribute the workload between several servers joined together in a cluster. This array increases performance and stability significantly compared to conventional Shared Hosting solutions.
It does not stop here. Smarter Hosting providers are providing Cloud Hosting Services with integrated Varnish Cache technology to amplify the speed even further! This post will help you understand how Varnish Cache makes a difference.
What is Varnish Cache and how does it help?
If you break it down, there are two primary ways to optimize your website for speed.
1) Optimize your webpage in terms of image compression, code minimisation, handling render blocking scripts etc. Things that you can handle within the code and architecture of your website. And
2) At the server level to efficiently transmit data from the server to the user’s web browser. Varnish Cache sits in the later part of speed optimization.
Typically, when a user is accessing any information from your server, the usual request-response procedure takes place where once the browser’s request is received by the server, it first of all decodes the request, then assembles the data, puts the data in the requested format and finally transmits it to the requesting browser. This is done for each and every request, and as the requests and users increase, the server resources get overwhelmed and ultimately become slow.
This is where Varnish Cache comes in. Varnish Cache sits in between the browser and the server. Every time there is a browser request, Varnish Cache saves a copy of it, so the next time there is a request for the same information, it is served from Varnish directly without having the need for the request to go to the server and perform the Request-Response procedure. So as more and more information gets cached in Varnish, it is that much faster for the users to access that information. This means that your web server needs to handle less traffic and your website’s performance and scalability go through the roof. In fact Varnish Cache is often the single most critical piece of software in a web based business.
Varnish Cache can help increase the site speed by 10X to 300X depending on your configuration! This coupled with basic on-site speed optimization and Cloud Hosting environment, can make your website work at a faster speed!
So there you go, if you are looking to unleash the true power of Cloud Hosting Services, definitely check with your hosting provider if he can setup Varnish Cache for you. Most of the providers will add it on for an extra price, but I would suggest looking for someone who has Varnish Cache as an existing feature in the Cloud Hosting services, because that provider knows what they is doing! Hope this helps, and feel free to put share your thoughts in the comments section below.