Speed · Hosting
Your site is slow: do you really need a more powerful server?
When a site is slow, the most common answer is to buy more powerful hosting. It is rarely the right one. Before spending, find out where the time goes, and it almost always goes in the site, not the server.
A true story: €600 a year and the site was still slow
A business was paying €600 a year for its server, and the site stayed slow. The explanation it had been given: “noisy neighbours”, because the machine was shared with other sites. We looked inside. The server was not the issue: there was a cache set to expire in 48 years and code that had never been optimised. More power would only have made the same problem more expensive.
Where the time goes
When you open a page, the server has to answer first, then the phone has to download and draw everything else: photos, fonts, scripts, the page builder's code. On most slow sites the bulk of the wait is in that second part. In the sites we audit, on 69% of sites the main content arrives on a phone after 2.5 seconds, and on 55% the home page weighs more than 3 MB: weight that no server, however powerful, makes disappear.
How to tell whether the server is to blame
Open PageSpeed Insights, run your site and look for the initial server response time. It is how long the server takes to send the first byte: if it stays under 0.8 seconds, the server is doing its job and the problem is elsewhere. If it is high, look at how the server is configured before changing hosting: a cache that does not work makes the server redo the same work on every visit.
What to check before spending
- Photos: are they resized and in a modern format like WebP, or uploaded straight off the camera?
- Plugins and scripts: how many are there, and how many are really needed?
- Cache: is there one, and is it set to clear when the site changes?
- Software: are the core and plugins up to date?
Only once these are sorted does it make sense to ask whether the server is enough. More in How much should a website weigh.
When the server really matters
A better-suited server is needed when the site does a lot of work on every request: an online shop with thousands of products, a management tool, many people connected at once. Even then, the choice is made on measured numbers, not on the feeling that “it is slow”. The sites we build are light by design, so their speed does not depend on buying more power.