How Wagga IT has the fastest Websites in Wagga
Why do we have the fastest websites in Wagga?
Each year, Wagga IT reviews and upgrades our backend website infrastructure. We take great pride in saying we invest heavily in our hosting infrastructure and conduct regular performance and security audits to ensure our client’s websites load at record speed.
The below upgrades not only improve the user’s experience but also increases your rankings on Google. Google awards websites that look aesthetic, are user friendly and load fast for the user.
It’s becoming more and more common for website designers to design great looking websites, but not take into account load time, code optimisation and quality of their hosting infrastructure. In fact, a large majority of Wagga Website designers do not host their websites in Australia! Crazy right!
Server Infrastructure Upgrades
Each year we evaluate the performance of our hosting hardware and determine whether an upgrade would be worth-while. This year we made the switch to AMD processors and new NVMe SSD’s for our entire web stack.
For the tech nerds, we have placed a comparison between the old and new infrastructure below:
Cache System Upgrades
This year we focused on implementing a new caching system for our websites. Website Caching ensures regular users to your website don’t have to download content each time they visit. Historically we have always used a NGINX web server with server-side caching, which don’t get me wrong, works well but is not above industry standard anymore.
With the implementation of HTTP/3 we have made the move to LiteSpeed Caching. LiteSpeed caching meant we had to rebuild our web server stack from scratch and manually move all our clients’ websites over the new system. The performance gains we have witnessed are simply mind blowing. Across all our websites, we have witnessed a load time reduction from 0.5 – 2 seconds load time, which may not seem a lot, but for your users and Google, it’s a MASSIVE improvement.
Performance Scores
Monitoring uptime and performance is something we take very seriously at Wagga IT. We monitor all our websites from 6 locations worldwide with 14-day performance metrics on website load time and uptime.
The below performance metric was taken from one of our clients here in Wagga on our new web server stack and highlights the benefits of regular upgrades and the decrease in load time for all their potential clients:
Security
Security is another very important aspect of running a website. Over the past 6 months we have seen a 200% increase in malicious attacks towards our clients’ websites. Out of the 200% increase, every single attempt was blocked thanks to our website firewall.
In 2020 we saw 171,952 brute force attempts against our website’s login page, simply insane. Although our firewall blocked these attacks, it was still putting a strain on our backend server during sophisticated attacks.
To circumnavigate these attacks on login and contact pages, we have installed Captcha on ALL our Wagga website clients. Although annoying for some users, it’s a small price to pay for a secure internet.
Comparison
To be above industry standard, we need to test and compare our infrastructure with competitors. As mentioned above, almost all Wagga Website Designers host their clients’ websites overseas due to it being a “cheaper” alternative.
All tests below were performed using a verified performance tool impersonating a Sydney user using Google Chrome.
Wagga IT’s Website:
A GTmetrix Grade of A is something that is very rare in 2021. It requires a superior backend infrastructure, caching system and proper optimization of code (CSS & JS). We are proud to be able to make our microscopic internet presence at a superior speed.
Wagga Website Designer 1:
This Wagga Website Designer has shown very little interest in ensuring their website is internet friendly and took 3.6 seconds to load for a simulated user in Sydney. This is a terrible example of how a website should be created.
Wagga Website Designer 2:
Another example of a poorly structured and slow website with very similar attributes to designer #1.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, most website designers overlook the back-end systems that power their websites and thus result in long load times for the entire internet. Very soon Google will start to consider Website’s load time and rank them accordingly.
With all the above in mind we have rolled out our new infrastructure to all customers at no additional cost. It’s our way of saying thanks to our wonderful clients and keeping the internet fast and secure!
Additional Note: If you would like to test your website, please use GTMetrix: https://gtmetrix.com/
Find out more about our website services: https://waggait.com.au/website-design