Bib & Tucker is a well known restaurant on the beach in Fremantle, Western Australia. They are known for the quality of their food and for using local suppliers.
Bib & Tucker receive a lot of website traffic for people who are searching for their brand.
However, they are also competing with other Fremantle restaurants for the attention of interstate and international tourists who do not know the local scene. These people will be using search engines to search for Fremantle restaurants.
Google has said that page speed is a ranking factor on search results.
So, a faster loading website will contribute to higher search engine rankings.
When we took on Bib & Tucker’s website, they were hosted with Dreamhost. Dreamhost’s servers are located in U.S.A., so local customers are waiting longer to view the website than if it were hosted on a Perth server.
So, we moved the website from Dreamhost to our own hosting backed by Servers Australia infrastructure.
- Our hosting uses solid state drives (SSD), instead of hard disk drives (HDD), so there is an immediate speed increase. SSDs are about 20 times faster than HDDs.
- Our hosting is located in Perth, Western Australia, so local customers don’t have to wait to connect to U.S.A. based web servers.
- We optimized WordPress to:
- compress images
- compress transfer of assets
- cache static content
(see our tutorial for optimizing WordPress – coming soon)
Here is the original website performance when located on Dreamhost:
Dreamhost website performance
Here is the final website performance when located on Webby Website Optimisation’s hosting and after WordPress optimization.
Website performance with Webby Website Optimisation
Let me know your results if you’re concerned.
Here’s closer look at the difference:
| Load Time | First Byte | Fully Loaded | Requests | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dreamhost First View | 11.57 | 3.150 | 15.268 | 87 |
| Dreamhost Repeat View | 1.668 | 1.093 | 2.552 | 4 |
| Doig Web Tech First View | 2.732 | 0.199 | 5.735 | 45 |
| Doig Web Tech Repeat View | 0.660 | 0.183 | 1.330 | 4 |
Here is the performance increases.
| Metric | Improvement |
|---|---|
| Load Time First View | 423% |
| Load Time Repeat View | 253% |
| Fully Loaded First View | 266% |
| Fully Loaded Repeat View | 129% |
| First Byte First View | 1582% |
| First Byte Repeat View | 597% |
Critically, it is the first byte metric that is used by Google’s search algorithm. So, improvements to your site’s first byte metric are the most important when optimising for speed.
If you are interested in a faster website, and higher search ranking results, contact me today.
If this post raised some questions about your business or your website, please feel free to ask me a question.
