Did you know that about 50% of internet users expect a site to load within 2 seconds or less? Yes, and if not, they tend to abandon that site and move on to faster alternatives. The slow pace will make your business fall on a double-edged sword, firstly you tend to lose your valuable clientele and secondly, your website misses out on important search engine visibility. The speed of the website is a vital ranking aspect for search engines like Google and if you’re slow, you lose the race.
So how do you speed up your website? Get your basics right by inspecting the hosting of your website. We all know that if the server where your website data is stored is slow, then the overall speed tends to reduce drastically. This is why nowadays website owners and webmasters are making informed and calculated choices about choosing website hosting packages.
Out of the various hosting options available like Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, Dedicated server hosting, etc., here we will look at Cloud Hosting and why more and more of webmasters are opting for it. This is because Cloud Hosting makes your website blazing fast and reduces the website load time. Rather than having a single server perform all tasks, Cloud Hosting platforms allocate the workload to several servers that are connected to each other in a cluster. This array propels stability and performance considerably compared to the usual Shared Hosting solutions. But, just relocating to Cloud Hosting is not sufficient. Advanced caching mechanisms are mandatory when it comes to super fast load time and one of the most prominent mechanisms is Varnish Caching.
The phenomenon that is Varnish Caching can literally boost your website speed by 1000%! You don’t believe that? Then ask the techies who work for Wikipedia or New York Times or any other websites that have super high traffic, all of them prefer the Varnish Caching technique.
What makes it so much sought after? Let’s delve deep into the mechanism of Varnish cache.
The conventional mechanism is when a user requests for any data from your site, the usual procedure initiates between the browser and server where your website data is located. The request is then decoded by the server, assembled, converted and transmitted back to the user’s browser. This is done for every request, and as the requests increase, the server resources get overwhelmed and gradually start slowing down.
This where Varnish Cache comes into the picture. Varnish Cache is located in between the browser and the server. So that each time that user requests data, Varnish saves a replica of the requested information, and if there is a request for identical information, it is sent from Varnish instantly without relying on the server. Varnish reduces the load on your server drastically and increases your website’s performance.
And that’s how Varnish cache works, so if you want to attain supersonic speeds for your website, choosing a hosting provider who uses Varnish is extremely essential.