Latency is the delay between a request being sent and a response actually being received — in web terms, the time between a browser requesting a page and the server sending back its first response. High latency makes a site feel sluggish, even before any actual content has started loading.
What Contributes to Latency
- Physical distance between the visitor and the server
- Server processing time, handling and preparing the request
- Network congestion along the route the data travels
- DNS lookup time, before a connection can even begin
Latency vs. Bandwidth
These get confused often, but they measure genuinely different things: latency is the delay before data starts arriving, while bandwidth is how much data can move once it does. A connection can have plenty of bandwidth and still suffer from high latency, and vice versa.
Reducing Latency
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve content from a location physically closer to visitors
- Choose a hosting provider with servers reasonably close to your primary target audience
- Minimize the number of separate server requests a page has to make
- Enable proper caching, to avoid unnecessary repeated processing
For anyone with a genuinely global audience, a CDN is usually the single most impactful fix — it puts a cached copy of a site physically closer to visitors wherever they happen to be.
« Back to Index