San Francisco, Dusseldorf 50 milliseconds – that’s what Cloudflare’s core promise revolves around. 95 percent of all users of the US company’s network service only have to wait a fraction of a second for the content of their website to load. The human brain perceives speeds of up to 100 milliseconds as “instantaneous”.
Cloudflare operates a kind of shadow internet, a “Content Delivery Network” (CDN), for customers such as L’Oréal, IBM or Zalando. It’s its own global network of servers that work together to deliver Internet content quickly. Cloudflare has data centers in nearly 300 cities, from Atlanta to Frankfurt to Osaka. The company assumes that it handles around 20 percent of international data transfers via its network. “Cloudflare has built one of the largest networks in the world,” said Matthew Prince, the company’s CEO.
High-tech companies like Cloudflare or Fastly have risen to become the invisible architects of the World Wide Web. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to combat our impatience. And business with it is booming. According to forecasts by market researcher Predence Research, the CDN market will grow from currently $19.7 billion to $105.6 billion in ten years.
The days of AOL telephone modems with long dial-in processes and minute-long loading times are long gone, people today have completely different expectations of “online”. More powerful smartphones and faster networks such as 5G mobile communications make it possible to access Internet content in real time – if the providers’ servers respond quickly enough.
“People are getting used to faster and faster connections and don’t accept long loading times – every millisecond has an impact,” says Jon Cherki, head of the French start-up Contentsquare.
The Frenchman with an office in New York knows what he is talking about. A few weeks ago, his company examined 35 billion visits to almost 3,000 websites in 26 countries. After that, 36 percent of all users showed frustration: they clicked on fields or buttons several times in order to supposedly speed up the process. If an element is clicked at least three times within two seconds, this is referred to as anger clicks.
Another result of the study: People jump off if they have to wait too long. “Speed determines sales and customer loyalty,” says Cherki. “If you don’t do it right, everything else is useless.”
Content is cached
With CDNs, companies like Fastly and Cloudflare offer a service that many users only notice when it is no longer there. In June 2021, according to Fastly, “an undiscovered software error” disabled the websites of Amazon, the “New York Times” or the English government. Cloudflare also paralyzed large parts of the Internet with failures in 2020 and 2022.
Basically, the international cloud business is dominated by three tech giants: Amazon, Google and Microsoft spend billions on fast and reliable infrastructure. But apart from these corporations, a class of specialist companies has established itself that are better at nothing than increasing the speed of Internet access.
The main thought leader in this area is Matthew Prince. His San Francisco-based Cloudflare is trying to beat Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in their own market. Unlike the big tech giants, however, it does not rely on the size of computing and storage capacities. For him, the literal proximity to the end customer counts. Because the closer a server is to one of the users, the faster access is.
An example: A website operator from Germany wants to make its services globally accessible quickly. He books Cloudflare for this. The team around Prince then acts as a digital buffer for the services of the customer from Germany. Cloudflare stores frequently used data in many of its data centers.
If a customer from Brazil then wants to access the German company’s home page, Cloudflare can provide the data directly from its local cache in Brazil. This can save several seconds of access time. That doesn’t sound like much. In the age of high-performance digital networks, one second can make the difference between the success and failure of a digital company.
Bringing the data to the user faster is an obvious step. But often the website itself slows down the loading time because it builds in the wrong order or makes other mistakes.
Up to 2.5 seconds is considered good by Google
Robin Allport has four smartphones on his desk. There, the head of website performance at Contentsquare looks at how quickly websites load in different environments. He reviews the work of the developers, who have to write code for everything: from the browser request to the moment when the website appears on the screen. “It shows how well programmers have done their jobs,” says Allport. “In the past, developers thought more about what was important to them when coding. Today they have to think about the customer.”
And Google makes sure that customers are not forgotten. Two years ago, the Internet company introduced the “Core Web Vitals”, the user-friendliness of a website became a ranking factor for searches. The faster and more pleasantly the website loads, the higher it will be ranked in a query.
Operators of CDN networks are invisible – their importance is only noticed when there is a failure, as was the case with the provider Fastly in 2021.
(Photo: imago images/Ritzau Scanpix)
Google developed various metrics to measure this. One milestone is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): It measures the time it takes from clicking the link to having most of the content appear on a website.
Speed was also a factor in the past, but what is new about this measurement is that it is from the user’s point of view. As an example of the importance of speed, Google cited an analysis of the Renault Group. The examined ten million web visits in 33 countries between December 2020 and March 2021. After that, the bounce rate falls by 14 percentage points and the conversion rate increases by 13 percent if the LCP value improves by one second.
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Overall, Google gives the specification: An LCP value of less than 2.5 seconds is considered good. Under four seconds, the verdict is “needs improvement” and above that it’s “lousy” – these sites slide down the search results list accordingly.
Google also prioritizes speed and user experiences for other metrics. The “First Input Delay” (FID) measures the time until the user can start interacting with the website. Hence the name: “Input Time Delay”. Google gives a good FID score when users can get started within 100 milliseconds.
Instead of large data centers, providers such as Cloudflare or Fastly build so-called “content delivery networks” with servers that quickly provide content from customers anywhere in the world.
(Photo: dpa)
Other metrics measure the layout stability of a website: How much do visible elements change their position or do other elements shift? In Google-speak, this is called “Cumulative Layout Shift” (CLS). “The layout mustn’t move while loading,” says Allport of Contentsquare. “It is important to prioritize visual content, people look first and read later.”
A few basic things are obvious to speed up the website. The simpler and plainer the design elements such as layout, typography or colors are, the faster it goes. The large white area around the Google search bar, for example, also serves this purpose.
Tricks like “lazy loading”
Images are data heavy and take longer, but they are more likely to bind visitors to the site. Finding the balance is important. This also applies to plug-ins, such as for search engine optimization or online marketing – they slow down the speed.
The website should be designed for “lazy load”: Content is only loaded when the user scrolls on it. “Lazy loading” has the opposite effect: it makes the page dynamic and saves loading time on first contact.
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“The rule applies: the most interesting content should appear first,” says Cherki, head of Contentsquare. Visitors should see things to try, such as the search bar appearing immediately. “You have to keep them busy, everything has to be found quickly and precisely.” According to Allport, the benchmark is Amazon, who would build their website “brilliantly”.
According to Charki, the problem for smaller companies that don’t have to be in competition with Amazon or Google is: “People appreciate their performance and every year the expectations go up a little bit.”
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