In an article published last month on the Design Ledger website, the author establishes a causal link between the declining attention span of Internet users and the need to increase website loading speed.
"The reduction in attention span is one of the greatest threats to your website."
Without questioning the validity of such a statement, it is undeniable that a slow website has verifiable consequences on visitor behavior. According to various sources:
- 40% of visitors abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load;
- A reduction in loading time from 8 to 2 seconds increases the conversion rate of visitors by 74%;
- Google now uses a website's loading time as one of the factors contributing to its ranking in search engine results.
The factors influencing the loading speed of a web page are numerous. One of the first elements to examine, used by Google in its ranking, is the TTFB, or time to first byte.
What is TTFB
When a web page is called up in our browser, the following actions are first executed:
- The domain name is translated into a numerical IP address, identifying the address of the web server. This translation is performed by domain name services (DNS), which are distributed across the Internet.
- Once the server's IP address is known, your web browser establishes a connection with this server.
- Once the connection is established and confirmed, the web server begins to prepare its response to your request. It constructs the requested page.
- As soon as it is ready, the server starts sending its response to your computer, the content of the requested page. This response is broken down into a series of data packets that are routed to your computer via the Internet. The number of these packets is determined by the amount of information contained in the requested web page. It is when your computer receives the first of these packets that the TTFB is recorded.
The ideal target speed for TTFB should be a maximum of 400 milliseconds. A server should therefore be able to send the first data packet to your browser in a little less than half a second. Slowness at this level will obviously have repercussions on the subsequent loading of the site.
Several factors can contribute to the variation in TTFB speed: the geographical location of the web server, its technical configuration, the number of tasks requested from the server's main processor, the number of simultaneous connections, etc.
At Percumedia, we ensure that the TTFB of the websites we develop and host is less than 400 ms. Our tests reveal that this is the case more than 90% of the time.
Accelerating Transmission
To achieve this result, several measures have been taken to optimize our server's response to web browser requests. One of them is the implementation of a reverse proxy cache, also known as a web accelerator. It is a virtual server located between the visitor's computer and the web server, on which the most frequently requested files are temporarily cached, thus relieving the web server of certain tasks.
In summary, it can be said that the reverse proxy cache is an additional server, whose sole function is to manage incoming and outgoing traffic, and to store the most frequently requested files in memory to speed up the availability of sites.
The use of a reverse proxy cache allows processing a greater number of simultaneous connections while accelerating the speed of web page transmission.
Another performance measure of speed concerns more specifically the sites we build.
As is known, Drupal is used as a development platform for all our websites. When a web page is requested by a visitor, Drupal must first build it using several files and interacting repeatedly with a database containing all the site's content and certain instructions for its display.
To speed up the delivery process of these pages, Drupal caches them to avoid rebuilding them each time. Drupal only rebuilds the cached page when content is modified or added. This process ensures that web pages are always ready to be sent, which has a significant impact on their transmission speed.
In a future article, other ways will be explored to accelerate the display of web pages, some of which can be used before adding new content to your website.
See you soon!