How Ditching GoDaddy Improved a Client’s Sitespeed by 45%

Thu, Apr 5, 2018

I’m obsessed with making sites load faster, and for good reason! It’s no secret that faster page load times improve SEO, conversion rate, and tons of other desirable metrics.

Don’t just take my word for it, here’s some write-ups from industry leaders on the topic:

• Why Performance Matters- Google
  
• Speed Is A Killer – Why Decreasing Page Load Time Can Drastically Increase Conversions
  
• The Google Speed Update: Page speed will become a ranking factor in mobile search - Search Engine Land
  
  

In this post I’ll outline how & why I migrated a client’s website from GoDaddy to Geekstorage, and experienced 45% faster load times!

Why (I Think) GoDaddy Sucks

Bad Reputation

It’s no secret that GoDaddy doesn’t have the best reputation. You can find an endless trail of posts online detailing their issues with dated infrastructure, overcrowding servers, lackluster security, and bad customer service.

Slow Adaptation of New Tech

In GoDaddy’s own words: “Benchmarks for PHP 7 consistently show speeds twice as fast as PHP 5.6”. Yet they were ~2 years behind competitors like Geekstorage & Siteground to adapt. Given GoDaddy’s own benchmarks, that’s 2 years of your site running twice as slow for sticking with them.
Some things that stood out to me right away were:

Various Other Reasons

It’s just way too easy to find evidence of GoDaddy lacking in various key areas. There are plenty of alternatives with superior features and glowing reviews.

I encourage you to do your own research, and see for yourself.

How I Switched Servers with No Downtime

No need to reinvent the wheel, WPBeginner does a great job explaining how!

Results

Simply switching hosts resulted in a 45% faster page load speed! The main difference was a slow Time To First Byte (TTFB) on Godaddy (2.5+ seconds) which was reduce to about 1 second on GeekStorage.
GeekStorage also allows for PHP 7, and most likely has more optimized & less crowded servers.

Before

After

Advice on Picking a Host

• Research benchmarks! I enjoy a site called Research as a Hobby which does an awesome monthly benchmark on various WordPress hosts
  
• Avoid the EIG family of companies due to their practice of overcrowded servers and lackluster support
  
• Join WordPress Facebook/Reddit groups to see what hosts people are enthusiastic about