How to Improve Server Response Time
Response Time is the amount of time that it takes for the server to send a response to the testing location. This variable may be impacted by the distance between the virtual visitor and the address of the website.
What Is Server Response Time?
Server response time is the amount of time it takes for a web server to respond to browser requests. The smaller the response time in milliseconds, the better. Even if your website is really well optimized, it will still be slow to end users if your server is slow, particularly when under load. This is why it is so important.
Server response time is the amount of time required to load the HTML document of a website from a server so that the client can begin rendering the page. Without a good server response time, the HTML document will take longer to load. If the HTML document is not loaded, that means the browser would not know what other resources will be required in order to display the page properly.
Factors that affect Server Response Time
Here’s are some factors that affect server response time and suggestions for how to improve it.
1 Traffic: Increased traffic means more resources are being used. Therefore, if your server’s capacity level is reached, then visitors will experience slower response times or even error codes such as bandwidth limit exceeded.
2 Bloated webpages: Webpages can get pretty bloated if the right optimization practices aren’t in place. This includes things like oversized images, non-responsive images, non-minified CSS/JS files, etc.
3 Web hosting: A web host that uses legacy hardware/software will result in slower response time for the user. Furthermore, even if your hosting provider offers the most up-to-date equipment available, there are various hosting options available. Typically, web hosts offer (at a minimum) shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated hosting solutions.
4 Caching: Caching is a crucial step in delivering content faster to users. However, the lack thereof creates unnecessary waiting periods due to the fact that the browser must request assets from the server every time instead of accessing them from a local or intermediary cache.
Ways to improve Server Response Times
The following optimizations are commonly used to improve server-side speed:
1 Code Optimization: Code optimization involves analyzing the code and database queries and finding the spots where the code is inefficient and where database queries are slow. After finding these hotspots, it’s the job of a developer to fix those problems. For code, this often involves finding a better algorithm or modifying the code to work around a bottleneck. For databases, this may involve adding indexes to speed up the query, rewriting the query or modifying the structure of the database.
2 Page Caching: Most websites today are dynamic, meaning that they pull from a database of information, insert the pulled data into templates, and then serve them to you. This happens every time when somebody requests a page from the server, and the time it takes to perform this process is dependent on the efficiency of the code and the power of said servers. Since the server is handling thousands of requests for the same page and is essentially building the same page every time. In page caching, the same page will be used to resend on every request to the server. Sending your user’s cached versions of pages is like giving them photocopies of a flyer. It’s much faster for you to give them photocopies than redrawing and writing the content each time somebody asks for one.
3 Improve Database Performance: Apart from the recommendations mentioned above, it’s also important to ensure that your database’s performance is optimized. There are various ways to go about optimizing database performance and it can potentially turn into a large undertaking depending on the current state of your existing database. Doing things like rewriting your queries with performance in mind, changing your schema to group objects and using indexes are a few ways you can optimize database performance.
4 Optimize Your Web Server: Ensuring that your server is fully optimized will help further reduce your server response time. When it comes to choosing server software, there are a few options available; although most users opt to use either Apache or Nginx. There are pros and cons to each web server although Nginx has been known to offer better performance in many circumstances.
[…] 11.Improve server response time: This rule triggers when PageSpeed Insights detects that your server response time is above 200 ms. Server response time is the amount of time it takes for a web server to respond to a request from a browser. No matter how optimized your web pages are for speed, if your server response time is slow your pages will display slow. For more about server response time and how to improve it, go to our post : How to Improve Server Response Time […]