Latency
Every website owner dreams about greater popularity. That's why we all
spend a lot of effort, time and money to promote websites. We make
useful and interesting content, spend time on social marketing, and
someone, perhaps, even buys a link.
And, often we do not even think about such things as performance of the site or latency. But, these factors can help the site rise higher in the SERP and increase revenue.
Wikipedia defines latency as "a measure of time delay experienced in a system, the precise definition of which depends on the system and the time being measured." In very simplified form, latency is the time required to send network packets and receive a response.
You can measure the latency using Ping, a network administration utility.
Latency is a relative measure. The smaller the latency, the better. Unfortunately, you cannot achieve zero latency, but you should strive to reduce it.
There are a lot of factors that affect latency. You should optimize low level infrastructure (use fast CPU, memory, storage, etc.) and high level infrastructure (use fast DNS, web server, etc.). It is very important to choose the optimal geographical location of the server where the website will be hosted. If your audience is located in China, there is little point to host a website in Germany
Latency is really important because it directly affects the user experience. There is a lot of evidence that slow websites lose visitors. For instance, according to Amazon, every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google is constantly talking about the importance of website speed. Google's experiment shows that the 0.5 seconds delay in search page generation time leads to a 20% drop in traffic.
Bad Latency affects the user experience, reflects the speed of the site and as a consequence leads to a smaller number of visits, page views, search queries and revenue drop.
We encourage webmasters to monitor the latency of their websites.
Latency (engineering)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latency_(engineering)#Packet-switched_networks
Latency Is Everywhere And It Costs You Sales - How To Crush It
http://highscalability.com/latency-everywhere-and-it-costs-you-sales-how-crush-it
The Cost of Latency
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/10/31/TheCostOfLatency.aspx
And, often we do not even think about such things as performance of the site or latency. But, these factors can help the site rise higher in the SERP and increase revenue.
What is Latency?
Wikipedia defines latency as "a measure of time delay experienced in a system, the precise definition of which depends on the system and the time being measured." In very simplified form, latency is the time required to send network packets and receive a response.
You can measure the latency using Ping, a network administration utility.
Latency is a relative measure. The smaller the latency, the better. Unfortunately, you cannot achieve zero latency, but you should strive to reduce it.
There are a lot of factors that affect latency. You should optimize low level infrastructure (use fast CPU, memory, storage, etc.) and high level infrastructure (use fast DNS, web server, etc.). It is very important to choose the optimal geographical location of the server where the website will be hosted. If your audience is located in China, there is little point to host a website in Germany
Why Does Latency Matter?
Latency is really important because it directly affects the user experience. There is a lot of evidence that slow websites lose visitors. For instance, according to Amazon, every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google is constantly talking about the importance of website speed. Google's experiment shows that the 0.5 seconds delay in search page generation time leads to a 20% drop in traffic.
Bad Latency affects the user experience, reflects the speed of the site and as a consequence leads to a smaller number of visits, page views, search queries and revenue drop.
We encourage webmasters to monitor the latency of their websites.
Learn more:
Latency (engineering)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latency_(engineering)#Packet-switched_networks
Latency Is Everywhere And It Costs You Sales - How To Crush It
http://highscalability.com/latency-everywhere-and-it-costs-you-sales-how-crush-it
The Cost of Latency
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/10/31/TheCostOfLatency.aspx
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