A lot of articles on the web tend to focus primarily on front-end optimizations and quick methods to speed up your site. Server optimizations such as network latency are sometimes ignored or neglected. Because of this, we thought it would be interesting to take a deeper look into the importance of network latency and the impact it has on your WordPress site when it’s loading in different regions. While a CDN can certainly help decrease network latency, the location of your hosting server is still very important , especially if you’re serving visitors in a specific geographic area. Latency matters, and we’ll show you a couple of reasons why.
What Is Network Latency?
Network latency refers to the time or delay that is involved in transmitting data across a network. In other words, the time it takes for a data packet to go from one point to another. Today this is usually measured in milliseconds, however, it could Network Latency be seconds depending on the network. The closer to zero, the better.
In other words, the greater the distance, the greater the latency, which equates to a longer delay. It’s impossible to beat the speed of light when it comes to data being transmitted over fiber optic cables. For example, below is a map of the Google Cloud Platform network. They have thousands of miles of cable running beneath the ocean spanning the entire globe. This is one reason why it’s one of the fastest networks in the world. And even with this extensive, cutting-edge network, there are still going to be latency delays.
There are a couple of different factors that contribute to network latency delay, which includes:
- Transmission delay: Different types of media, such as wireless or fiber optic connections all introduce some type of delay since they can only deliver a few bits. For example, a fiber optic connection will have a lower transmission delay than a T1 line. You should also consider the packet size.
- Propagation delay: This is the time it laos email list takes for the data packet to travel. This could include distance, network delays, etc.
- Queuing Delay: If bandwidth is exceeded, there may be queuing delays where data has to wait at the host or router. This can Network Latency be affected by network congestion.
Why Network Latency Matters.
Some might argue that network latency isn’t very important however, it can be depending on where you choose to host your site. For media and its assets (like images, JavaScript, CSS, Video), a CDN can take care of a lot of the extra latency involved by delivering a copy from a closer server. However, in most setups, you still have to query your hosting server for the initial DOC load. And this is why latency matters!
Latency is especially important when it comes how i would scale a business from to businesses that serve visitors in a specific geographic location. For example, let’s say you have an e-commerce store in Sydney, and 90% of your customers are from Australia. Your business could benefit from placing your site on a server in Australia, vs hosting in Europe or the United States. We’ll get into how much that impacts your site below.
Comparing Google Cloud Network Latency
Distance is one of the main reasons for belgium numbers latency delay. However, it is important to remember that although latency is not only affected by distance, but also by the number of hops you make, between routers, etc. Some of the ways to measure network latency include ping, traceroute, and MTR. In this example, we are simply going to use ping and traceroute times to run some tests. If you really want to dig deeper into the data, you can run traceroute commands .
