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:

• How to enable Cloudflare CDN 
• How to enable SuperCacher