You know how you open some websites and everything loads in a split second?
And you open others and stare at a blank screen for minutes, impatiently tapping your fingers while you wait?
If you care about online success, performance is one of the most important aspects to get right. Yet most marketers completely ignore it. Obsessing over content and design, launching campaigns after campaigns…
While their slow websites quietly murder their conversions.
Here’s the Problem:
Website performance is entirely dependent on the underlying tech stack. It’s what determines whether a visitor bounces or stays. And if marketers don’t at least understand the basics of what goes into building a fast website, they’re missing a trick.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why Website Performance Matters For Marketing
- The Core Components Of A High-Performance Tech Stack
- Web Hosting Services And Server Location
- How To Choose The Right Setup For Your Audience
Why Website Performance Matters For Marketing
Let’s cut to the chase.
Website speed directly correlates to revenue.
53% of mobile users will abandon a website if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, according to Google Analytics data.
Hang on. That’s over half of potential customers leaving before they even see the offer. All because of a sluggish website. And it gets worse…
A one-second delay in page load time can cause conversion rates to drop by 7%. In other words, a website that loads in 4 seconds instead of 3 is bleeding leads. Day in, day out.
Search Engines also Care About Speed.
Google uses page speed as a ranking signal. Websites that load quickly rank higher. Slower websites get buried in search results. So the tech stack behind a website is just as important as the marketing strategy layered on top of it.
The Core Components Of A High-Performance Tech Stack
Ok, so what actually makes a website fast?
It comes down to several core components working together.
But even if you’re not a technical person, having a baseline understanding of these fundamentals helps marketers make informed decisions and ask the right questions.
Here’s the Main Thing:
It all starts with web hosting services. That’s where the website lives. The hosting provider stores all of the files, images and data that make up the website. Pick the wrong host and it’s like building a house on sand.
Then there’s server configuration, including RAM, CPU power and storage type. These determine how quickly a server can respond to a visitor’s request. The more of these resources, the faster the performance will generally be.
Finally, there’s the CDN. Short for Content Delivery Network, a CDN spreads the website’s content across multiple servers around the world. This means less distance for data to travel.
Ok, that was pretty straightforward, right?
Web Hosting Services And Server Location
Here’s something most marketers don’t know or pay attention to…
Server location actually makes a huge difference.
The physical distance between the server and a visitor affects loading speed. The data has to travel from the server to the user’s device. The further it has to travel, the longer it takes.
For instance, a website based in the United States will take longer to load for visitors in Singapore than for visitors in New York. This is called latency, and it can kill performance for international visitors.
That’s why businesses looking to target specific regions need hosting for Asia-based audience solutions with servers based near their customers. Data centres that are located in the right geographic area reduce latency and speed up content delivery.
The difference is quite noticeable.
Websites hosted close to their audiences can achieve response times of under 200 milliseconds. Distant locations can struggle to keep below 300-500 milliseconds. That difference quickly adds up with every page view and every visitor.
It’s why savvy marketers consider where their hosting provider keeps their servers. Especially if they have regional targets like Asia Pacific, Europe or individual countries.
Types Of Web Hosting Services Explained
Not all web hosting is created equal, of course.
There are several types of web hosting services, each with its own pros and cons. But knowing what the options are helps marketers choose the right one.
Shared Hosting is the cheap option. Many websites share a single server and its resources. This is cheap, but websites can suffer slow performance during traffic spikes. Ok for very small sites that are just getting off the ground.
VPS Hosting is Virtual Private Server hosting. A website has its own dedicated resources on a shared server. It’s faster and more reliable than shared hosting. A good middle ground option.
Dedicated Hosting is where an entire server is used by a single website. Maximum performance and control, but it costs more and requires some technical know-how.
Cloud Hosting hosts resources are distributed across many virtual servers, not just one physical machine. These can automatically scale resources up or down based on the amount of traffic a site is receiving. Good for sites that have unpredictable spikes in visitors.
Here’s the takeaway:
Different websites will have different needs. It all depends on the volume of traffic, available budget and any technical requirements. Marketers don’t need to become server specialists. But it does help when having conversations with developers and when evaluating web hosting providers.
CDNs: The Performance Multiplier
Ok, but how can you make a website super-fast for international visitors?
You need a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
A CDN caches copies of a website’s content on servers in multiple locations. Then, when someone visits the site, the content is served from the closest server.
This has two major advantages.
First, it dramatically cuts the loading times for international visitors. A visitor in London accesses content from a European server rather than waiting for it to load from the other side of the world.
Second, it takes some of the strain off of the main server. The traffic is distributed across the network. The website stays fast even during peak periods.
Most good quality hosting providers will offer CDN integration. It’s one of the simplest upgrades to give performance an instant boost.
How To Evaluate Your Current Setup
Still not sure if the existing tech stack is an issue or not?
Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix will analyse your website’s performance for free. They’ll tell you exactly what’s slowing things down.
Look for these key metrics:
Time to First Byte (TTFB) is how long it takes for the server to respond to a request. It should be below 200 milliseconds. Anything above 600 milliseconds is a sign that hosting is an issue.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is the time it takes for the largest piece of content to become visible. Google considers less than 2.5 seconds as a good user experience.
Bringing It All Together
Building a high-performance website isn’t just the job of developers.
Marketers who understand the basics of the tech stack have a leg up. They can make better, informed decisions. They can push for the right hosting setup, and the correct server locations. They can identify performance issues before it wrecks a campaign.
Here’s the key takeaways:
- Web hosting services make up the foundation of the whole setup
- Server location has a big impact on speed, and this varies for different regions
- There are different types of web hosting and you need to match this to the website’s traffic levels and goals
- CDNs can multiply performance for global visitors
Speed is a competitive advantage.
Every second shaved off page load time means more visitors who stay. More leads who convert. More revenue that gets counted at the end of the day.
Websites that are winning right now aren’t just better designed, or well-optimised for SEO…
They’re fast.
And it all starts with the tech stack.