How to Ensure Your Website Loads Fast in Multiple Countries

A potential visitor discovers your site via a search engine. The snippet looks exactly like what they want. They click the link.

The screen stays blank. One second goes by. Two seconds. In three seconds, they’ve pressed the back button and gone to a competitor.

Think of this happening many times a day in various parts of the world. Checking your website from your office in New York showing it loads immediately might make you assume everything is fine. However, for a user in Tokyo, London, or Sydney, the website may seem very slow because of the long physical distance between them and your server.

Website speed is no longer just an unofficial technical issue; it is one of the fundamental aspects of user experience (UX). Longer loading times are usually followed by users leaving the site quickly and fewer conversions. Additionally, page speed is one of the factors Google considers when ranking websites.

In this guide, we want to equip you with practical ways to remedy this issue that you can immediately apply. These methods include using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), minimising code, and others.

Among other strategies, we will discuss why distance causes slow loading and what measures you can take to improve your website speed globally without compromising your content quality.

Why Distance Matters: The Physics of Global Loading

Fixing the issue of slow-loading global websites starts with understanding the reason for this. Basically, the laws of physics come into play here.



Latency Explained

Although it seems like the Internet is instantaneous, data has to travel through a network of physical cables lying underground or under the sea. The length of time for this journey is referred to as network latency.

Light is fast, but it is not instantaneous, and most of the time, data packets have to be passed through various routers and switches before they can get to the destination.

In the case of a website located on a server in California, a user in Los Angeles will hardly notice any latency. Meanwhile, a user in Paris is at least a few thousand miles away. In addition to crossing a continent, the request has to go over an ocean as well. That is the physical distance between the two points which adds milliseconds of delay to every single interaction.

"Round Trip" Time

On top of that, the matter is further complicated by the fact that a webpage is not loaded in a single action. Instead, it involves constant back-and-forth communication between the user and the server.

A user’s browser first requests the HTML document (one trip), then the CSS files (another trip), followed by images (several more trips), and finally JavaScript files (even more trips). Each of these steps is known as a “round trip,” meaning the time it takes for data to travel to the server and return.

Now, imagine accessing a website while travelling abroad or browsing content hosted in another country. The farther you are from the server’s physical location, the longer each round trip takes. For example, if a single request has a latency of 200 milliseconds and the page requires 50 requests to fully load, delays quickly stack up, resulting in a sluggish user experience. This is especially noticeable when users move between regions or access websites hosted on servers located on the opposite side of the world.

This is why server location plays a critical role in performance. If a large portion of your audience comes from a specific country or region, hosting your website closer to them is essential. Using a US-based server while targeting users in Australia, for instance, can severely impact load times. To avoid this issue and ensure optimal performance, it’s important to choose reliable web hosting Australia providers by checking expert reviews on Cybernews and selecting a data center close to your primary audience.



Know Your Numbers: Testing Speed from Different Locations

The expression "you cannot repair something if you do not know where it is broken" fits here quite well. Site owners are at fault here for mainly measuring the wrong metrics.



The Illusion of Local Testing

Loading your own website on your laptop is an inaccurate test of its speed. This happens because your computer runs a browser that has a cache of images and files, i.e., it has a version of them stored locally. So, it does not necessarily have to download them from the server all the time.

The host is likely close to you if you bought a hosting plan from a company in your country of residence. Hence, you are given a false sense of security.

Tools of the Trade

In order to grasp how your global users experience your site, you need to have tools that allow you to simulate users from different countries.

• Google PageSpeed Insights: This is the tool that offers thorough, performance-based assessments of your site accompanied by a set of tailored recommendations for improvement.
• GTmetrix: It is wonderful that this tool enables you to change the location of the server performing the test. Hence, you can run the test once from Vancouver and then next from Mumbai and analyse the differences in the results.
• Pingdom: A simple-to-use performance monitoring tool that provides you with the breakdown of the loading times of different file types and server response.



What to Look For

When going through these results, do not simply take the final loading time at face value. Besides that, check the Time to First Byte (TTFB). This is the time it takes between the moment the browser requests until the very first piece of data is received.

Hence, if the TTFB is significantly higher in other countries, then the culprit is surely the latency caused by geographical distance, which thus confirms the assumption.

The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is another important metric to consider. This signals the stage at which the main content of the page has been loaded and is therefore viewable by the user.

The Game Changer: Leveraging Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

In case the only adjustment you make is to your global loading speed, then this one should be it.



What is a CDN?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) can be described as a network of geographically dispersed servers. The objective of a CDN is to reduce the distance between the user and the data they want in a physical sense.



How CDN Optimisation Works

When it is a single origin server, every user can connect to only that one server wherever they are located in the world. A CDN, on the other hand, allows for the copying of the static parts of your site—CSS files, JavaScript, images etc.—to servers that are located in different areas around the world.

So, when a user from Germany comes to your site, your CDN recognises that location and provides the content from a server in Frankfurt. But, if it is without a CDN, the visitor's data requests will always go back to your main server located in Texas.

The data travels a few hundred miles instead of a few thousand. Hence, the latency and round-trip times are vastly reduced.

Picking a Provider

Out there, there are many solid CDN providers to choose from. If you want to be sure that the provider has strong coverage in Asia, select one based on your audience location.

• Cloudflare: Famous for its extensive network and user-friendly free tier.
• Akamai: One of the biggest and the oldest CDN providers that are popular among top-notch companies.
• Amazon CloudFront: Great if you want it to be integrated with other AWS services that you are already using.



Optimising the Asset Load: Code and Content

Nonetheless, even if you have a content delivery network set up, make sure that the files you are sending are as light as possible. Basically, big files will slow down your website regardless of the good CDN you have.



Image Optimisation

High-resolution large images are the greatest consumers of bandwidth in most cases. No matter how powerful your server is, a 5MB banner image won't load quickly on a 4G network in a remote location in rural Brazil.

• Next-Gen Formats: Change normal JPGs and PNGs to WebP. This new file type has better compression and quality with a smaller file size.
• Compression: Use a program that is able to remove unnecessary data from images without affecting their quality.
• Lazy Loading: Set your site so that images only appear when a visitor starts swiping down the page. This significantly speeds up the initial load.



Code Hygiene (Minification)

The website that you visit is based on three technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Usually, a programmer writes code with a sufficient number of spaces, comments, and line breaks in order to read it easily.

Computers, however, do not require any white space.

Minification means the removal of everything that is not needed from the code without changing its functionality. The size of the file is reduced, so the transmission is faster. Most of the time, modern caching plugins or CDNs can do this on their own.

Browser Caching

For local storage of static files, you may ask the browser of the user if it can store those files on its hard drive. So, when the same user comes to your page the second time, the browser will already have the logo and will not download it again. It will be the matter of a few seconds for the entire loading process.

By setting a longer expiry date for your static resources, you ensure that repeat visitors to your site will have super-fast access to those resources.

Technical Tweaks: DNS and Mobile First

As your efforts toward optimisation escalate, the call for technical configurations may arise. These gears can function both individually and collectively for maximum user experience impact.



Optimising DNS Resolution

Before connecting to your website, a computer first needs to find out your IP address using the Domain Name System (DNS). Think of it as a lookup in a phone directory. If your DNS hosting is poorly maintained, there will be a delay in the connection. Unless the DNS provider is of premium quality and is fast enough, the initial stage of the connection would remain slow.



Mobile Optimisation for Global Users

Two strategies that companies pursue the world over are developing a mobile-responsive and a performant website. These have become a must and a bastion of the website’s success globally.

In fact, in the coming times, Google would rank your site based on its majority audience that access the internet through mobile devices.

Besides, always remember that a non-responsive website is an instant turnoff for mobile users not to mention the site loading issues users will face due to networking problems.

The Bottom Line

To get fast loading speeds at a global scale, you need to:

• write efficient code,
• use distributed infrastructure (CDNs),
• test regularly from different locations.

Keep in mind that speed is a metric that directly shows your revenue. Shortening your loading time by even just one second doubles the chances of your visitors staying, engaging, and converting.



Don't let geography be a barrier to your business growth.

Try running a speed test in a different continent or country now. If the results make you wince, you know exactly where to start.