The new SiteGround.com is now super fast!
A lot has been said about our new website design: how it looks, what values it communicates and how it changes our hosting plans structure. However, I would like to turn your attention to another aspect of our new website – its amazing loading speed. During the last year I have worked consistently on implementing a lot of speed-related innovations to our hosting service (multiple server locations, Cloudflare CDN, the SuperCacher). I have also talked about speed optimizations on many events, but mainly in the context of our customers’ websites. Now it is the time that I shed some light on the magic behind our own website´s amazing loading speed.
Speed test results
We have used several tools like Pingdom.com, Google PageSpeed, the page loading speed tool included in Chrome browser and ySlow extension for Mozilla to measure our website speed and its optimization level. The site shows consistent results of loading below 1 second from different world locations(The numbers we had are in the range 0.66-0.88 secs).
Just to give you a little context how this compares with others: from the 15 other leading web hosts we have tested only one has achieved similar loading results. However, our home page structure is considerably more complex and includes more images, java script and dynamic content. The average loading time for the industry is around 2 sec, which is more than 2 times slower than our results.
How did we achieve that?
We minimized the number of HTTP requests sent to the server until the page load event from 40 down to under 10. We did that by optimizing our images and putting all of them into image sprites; minifying JavaScript, CSS files and combining them into one single file; minifying HTML and gziping all resources that could be gzipped.
Our website also takes advantage of a Content Delivery Network (or CDN), which hosts our images and static content (JavaScript, CSS) and delivers it to the end user from the closest to POP (Point of Presence), which also greatly reduces the load time of the website.
On top of all those optimizations we did, we also started caching our website using the same principles that are behind the SiteGround SuperCacher, making the HTML generation of all pages nearly immediate. HTML is now delivered to the end user within just 0.01 seconds plus the round trip time of the packets. And this is INSANELY FAST. All the other optimizations we did account for only 30% of the speed optimization, wheras the SuperCacher does the rest of the speeding up. SiteGround’s website now uses all of the following – SuperCacher Dynamic Caching, Memcached and SuperCacher static caching.
Is this magic applicable for our customers’ websites?
Yes, absolutely! Actually, the speed optimization tools were available to our customers even before our new website launch:
CDN
We have included a CDN service that can be used free of charge. It not only distributes a copy of your website to different geographical locations but includes options for further speed optimization like autominify and railgun.
SuperCacher
We have also provided access to all caching options through our SuperCacher to all customers that use a plan higher than the StartUp. With just few clicks you can improve your site performance drastically.
So, go on and make your website faster now! It is easy — you just have to switch on the corresponding tools in your cPanel:
Comments ( 17 )
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Pavel Ivanov
Good job :) keep rocking!!!
hoanganh
My website is running smooth!
Tuan
The loading speed of my site is still more than 3 seconds. What should I do to optimize it? How could I activate CDN service you mentioned above? Is that Cloudflare? Thanks
Lily Siteground Team
Hi Tuan, I saw that you have already managed to switch on the Cloudflare service for your domain techwalls.com from the cPanel. You are also using our GoGeek plan and your website is built on WordPress. This gives you the opportunity to benefit from the highest level of "speed optimization we have -- the dynamic cache option in our SuperCacher. To switch it on follow the instructions in this article: http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/supercacher/dynamic_cache/ If you need assistance, contact our support team. Lilyana
Max
You forgot to configure gzip compression of js and css files. https://www.siteground.com/blog/wp-content/themes/sgblog/style.css Element size: 20K MIME type: text/css Compressed version could weight 22% Test your site with some of the tools listed on http://siteloadtest.com and you'll probably find more problems.
Hristo Siteground Team
Actually, the gZip compression is working for our blog :) However, thank you for the suggestion, I will definitely make few more checks just to be sure there isn't something we've missed!
A A Mon
I don't know where to write this so I write here. It seems upgrade account price is not fair for existing customer. Please help!
Marina Siteground Team
Hello A A Mon, Our upgrade pricing reflects the difference between the regular monthly prices of our hosting plans. The StartUp plan goes for $9.95/mo and GrowBig goes for $14.95/mo with a difference of $5/mo between the two. The upgrade price for moving from StartUp to GrowBig is $4.95/mo. A customer who wants to move to a higher plan will pay only that difference in the regular monthly prices and only for the remaining months of their prepaid period. If you are referring to a special situation, which we have misunderstood, please contact us on our LiveChat where our representatives can review the case in detail. Regards!
Oana Loredana
This post helped me. Now i know to make my website to work 100%. In this moment i have 73/100 ... I try to make 100/100 if i can. Thank you very much for this article.
Ahmed
Ever since we moved our SimplerWebs site to SG, our experience has been just exceptional and we wish we got to know SG years before. Now, when we work on designing a site for a new client, the first thing we do is we show them our speed test result when our site was hosting at BH and after we moved to SG and we encourage them to consider using SG for their hosting. As I am writing this, our Page speed grade is 92% and YSLOW 96% by just enablingGoogle PageSpeed and memcache. We have not yet setup Cloudflare yet because we are worrying as to what would happen with the already indexed pages when we have a redirect domain from a www to a non-www domain. We do want to redirect it back to the www and enable CDN but we are worried how it will affect our site index. Also, we are thinking of disabling Google PageSpeed and test the other option SG has available such as Varnish Dynamic Cache and Vanish Static Cache. Again, we had such a great experience with the SG team and site speed improvement that we are still wondering how we were able to live without SG before switching to them. Thank you guys for doing such a wonderful job and we envision that we are going to have a very long relationship with SG. Thank you SG Team! SimplerWebs
Mike Peace
I just signed up for service and maybe bad timing as the "Password Lookup" functionality does not work and trying to raise a ticket gives me "Support is down for maintenance" message. I will wait for an hour and try again. Not a good start with SiteGround ...
Charlie Prado
Encantado con sus servicios
Julia
Actually, the gZip compression is working for our blog :) However, thank you for the suggestion, I will definitely make few more checks just to be sure there isn’t something we’ve missed!
nauka tenisa
I am looking for the best hosting services. I have smth about 20 websites. What are the ping's to Eastern Europe? How about safety things. I have some problems with hacking my wordpress sites. Regards Paul
Marina Siteground Team
Hello Nauka, we will be glad to answer your questions and help you find the best plan suitable for your need. Just call us at 1.866.605.2484, send us an email at sales at siteground dot com, or come to chat at https://siteground.chat-assistance.com/request
Felix Max
Please how can i make my site fast as Site fast as siteground? Will SuperCacher work for vbulletin. Your feedback will be appreciated
Hristo Siteground Team
Unfortunatelly, SupeCacher doesn't work with vBulleting, right now we only support WordPress, Joomla and Magento. However, vBulletin works pretty fast out of the box on our servers even without caching :)
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