As a small business owner, it is understandable that you want your website to be as successful as possible. The website is a way to attract new customers and retain the loyalty of existing ones. Keeping this in mind, it is clear that ensuring the speed of your website is essential. GreenGeeks is a popular web hosting provider used by many businesses around the world. Does it have the speed that you need? Let’s find out!
About GreenGeeks
The creator of GreenGeeks, Trey Gardner, began the company because he realized how few eco-friendly web hosting companies existed. In addition to this, the industry was notorious for the amount of energy it consumed. He wanted to create a web hosting company that helped the environment rather than hinder it.
GreenGeeks started back in 2008 and has been steadily growing ever since then. GreenGeeks is currently hosting over 500,000 websites. They are 300% energy efficient, and their hosting clients are carbon-reducing. This is in contrast to the majority of web hosting companies in the world.
Speed
The first thing you will want to know about is the provider’s speed. Customers of GreenGeeks have tested the speed based on different areas around the world. The speeds relate to milliseconds per loading page on a website. For this particular test, the website was being hosted from Canada. The results were as follows:
· Western United States: 66ms
· Eastern United States: 19ms
· London: 191ms
· Singapore: 455ms
· Sao Paulo: 151ms
· Bangalore: 324ms
· Sydney: 262ms
· Japan: 214ms
· Canada: 9ms
· Germany: 95ms
As a worldwide average, the speed of the website was 178.60ms.
The customer performed the same test on a United States’ hosted website. The results were as follows:
· Western United States: 50ms
· Eastern United States: 23ms
· London: 86ms
· Singapore: 218ms
· Sao Paulo: 145ms
· Bangalore: 208ms
· Sydney: 186ms
· Japan: 151ms
· Canada: 20ms
· Germany: 99ms
The worldwide average for this website was 118.60ms.
As a general rule of thumb, website owners should ensure a speed of at least 2,000ms per loading page. If they do not accomplish this, they run the risk of losing client attention. If a website has speeds of over 2,000ms, its bounce rate is over four times that of quicker sites. The bounce rate is referring to visitors who open the webpage but navigate away before it loads. This lowers the SEO rating of the site and causes it to fall below competitors. GreenGeeks’ loading times are well below the minimum speed, even when tested in a variety of different countries.
Data Centers
The number of data centers that a web hosting provider has is a factor in determining their speed. The location where these centers are will also affect the speed. If you have data centers spread out in a lot of different locations, your clients in those areas will experience faster speeds. GreenGeeks has data centers in the following cities:
· Montreal, Canada
· Toronto, Canada
· Phoenix, United States
· Chicago, United States
· Amsterdam, Netherlands
Having data centers near their customers is one reason why GreenGeeks excels at providing quick speeds. People will be able to work more efficiently and have fewer connectivity problems if there is a data center relatively close to them. GreenGeeks has committed to always keeping its data centers updated with the newest technology and hardware.
Optimization
Another way that GreenGeeks improves speed is through the various optimizations that they offer. Having a hosting plan with the company includes the use of the following perks:
Free CDN: Powered by Cloudflare, this service reduces the amount of time it takes for clients to receive website data. This occurs by caching the content and saving a copy of the static web pages.
SSD Hard Drives: GreenGeeks always tries to stay in tune with the changes in technology. Several years ago, they upgraded all their clients to servers that use SSD (solid-state drives). Client website files and databases get stored on these drives, which improves the speed and reliability of service.
PHP 7: The company was very quick to enable PHP 7 on all its servers. PHP is a programing language, and 7 is the latest update. PHP code gets inserted into HTML code, improving the information interface. With this increased performance, website speeds will correspondingly improve.
The Verdict?
GreenGeeks is certainly a strong contender for fast speeds. This web hosting provider offers customers very quick loading times, as demonstrated by the speed test above. In addition to this, their various measures to improve speed continually contribute to their success. This includes having data centers spread out around the world and working on new optimizations to increase their customers’ speed.