Website speed and its effect on the Google rankings

medium.com

2 pointsavemflyamit2 comments

One more speed vs. rankings factor is the geolocation of the host vis-a-vis that of the traffic/visitors.

A recent case in point:

Late last month, I was commissioned to speed up a (WordPress) site that has predominantly Indian traffic. (Banking jobs)

The site was hosted at some GoDaddy shared server in the US. I recommended migrating it to Digital Ocean. Their data center closest to India at that point was Singapore and I setup a droplet with LEMP etc. and migrated the site there.

Within a few days, the daily page view count jumped from a long-term average of ~15,000 to 17,000. Then, in the 2nd week of this month, they activated a data center in Bangalore (India) and I immediately migrated the site there.

Since then, the traffic has been rising steadily and today, it has crossed a new high of 25,000 page views. No other changes made to the site (no SEO work either) other than the two successive migrations, and the traffic grew from 15k PVs to 25k PVs!!

I attribute most of this to a general ranking boost owing to the change in the geolocation of the host.

My contention here is that Google (rightfully) assumes that host close to visitors = faster speeds = better UX, so give it a ranking boost.

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