The Real Impact of Hosting Location on Website Speed and SEO: What the Data Says

I once built an eCommerce site for a golf apparel brand, and I remember the CEO saying we should opt for the cheapest possible hosting in the US and just tack on a CDN, because, in his words, “Hosting location no longer matters as long as you use a CDN.”

He was partially right, with some huge caveats.

I didn’t know enough about the issue back then. Unfortunately, we had to wait to see that the company’s customers in places like Europe and Asia saw significantly slower page load times than visitors in New York, even though everyone got served from the same CDN.

Here was the problem: We were fighting against the laws of physics. Greater distance still means lengthier delays. Geography is less of a factor with a CDN, but it’s not irrelevant.

I’ve found — thanks to studies from Cloudflare, Google, and academic researchers — that the effect of hosting location on SEO and speed is more nuanced than a blanket statement like “Hosting location no longer matters with a CDN.” I’ll explain it all below.

Every page request online traverses hundreds if not thousands of miles on fiber optic cable, just so you can see one product page or social media post.

Logically, that means a request by someone in Chicago for a page on a server in Berlin will take much longer to deliver than if that page were sitting on a server in Chicago.

I’ve heard some people say, “Well, with a CDN that doesn’t matter as much,” or “This data moves so fast that a few thousand miles doesn’t matter.” Cloudflare claims it’s not that simple.

Key information from Cloudflare:

• Every continental hop adds 70-150ms of latency to an online request.
• Someone in Los Angeles requesting a site from Columbus, Ohio, would take 40-50 milliseconds, but someone in Cleveland (much closer) requesting from the same Columbus server would receive their reply in 5-10 seconds.
• It can take up to 145 milliseconds to deliver a data packet from New York City to London, showing the increase in time because of the continental hop.

As I’ll explain later on, the idea that a CDN mitigates issues with latency over long distances is somewhat true. Yet, a CDN doesn’t eliminate latency. It simply redirects that latency. So, instead of images and CSS and JavaScript (which CDNs do a wonderful job of caching) slowing down your site, the burden falls on all that dynamic content that needs to pull from your origin server.

I know ‌a great, lingering myth that many website owners cling to: Google cares where your server is located. That’s unequivocally false. John Mueller has stated many times that Google doesn’t use a server’s IP as a ranking factor.

Mueller even says that for geotargeting: “Specifically for geotargeting, the server’s location plays a small role, in many cases it’s irrelevant.”

Here’s where Google actually gets its geotargeting information from (as opposed to the IP of your server):

• Hreflang tags
• Search Console settings
• ccTLDs

I would never deny, however, that hosting distance has an indirect impact on search engine results.

Here’s how your server location could indirectly affect SEO:

1. Better server location → Faster site → This improves your Core Web Vitals → Google increases your rankings
2. Better server location → Faster site → Lower bounce rates → Engagement improves → Google boosts your rankings
3. Better server location → Faster site → Google can regularly scan more of your pages → Google may boost page rankings because of this

Hosting location doesn’t directly influence rankings. But if the location of your server makes your site slower for users in other countries, that affects other things like user behavior, Core Web Vitals, and bounce rates, all of which Google factors into its rankings.

If you think a CDN solves all problems that come with the distance between your server and the user, think again. I have numbers to prove there’s a real “distance penalty” dished out by search engines, even if they claim there’s not a direct effect on rankings. We see that penalty both when using a CDN and not.

Here’s a study from Kinsta where TTFB (Time To First Byte) increases with distance when using both shared hosting and faster, CDN-supported, hosting (user is based in the US):

To strengthen my argument, two other reports came up with similar results:

• SEO PowerSuite Study: This research displays many instances of long-distance communications between users and servers increasing load times. They then added a server in Europe, closer to the end users, and cut TTFB rates by 80%.
• Cloudflare Whitepaper: This study shows that the overall distance between origin servers and end users is one of the main contributors to increased latency.

Most studies of this nature refer to additional reasons for slower websites due to distance. You must also account for “tail latency,” or how users with the slowest-performing internet connections and devices suffer disproportionately with speed thanks to distance. That’s because problems compound.

For example, a slow TTFB forces the browser to hold off on rendering until that first byte comes through, thereby multiplying the overall performance issues.

A CDN distributes your content — like images and JavaScript files — across a network of servers spread globally. Those servers cache your content so the end user can get your website content from the geographically closest machine. That improves load times for the end user.

CDNs are wildly effective. They help solve an abundance of location-based hosting problems.

• One academic study produced a 95% improvement in the performance of a WordPress website when implementing Cloudflare’s CDN.
• Kinsta improved TTFB by 73% while testing its CDN in Stockholm.
• Paessler noted an improvement of 15-30% in website performance when using a multi-CDN strategy.

So, I’m not saying you shouldn’t use CDNs. They’re a crucial part of improving website performance despite locational challenges. But you should remember that CDNs have limitations, primarily how they struggle with personalized HTML and dynamic content, as well as with database queries and API calls.

Luckily, we’re seeing that edge computing helps solve some of these limitations; that’s because edge networks go a step beyond just caching files — they render pages and run requests from each edge network location.

CDNs are accessible to virtually any type of business. I’m not yet sold on the accessibility of edge networks, though. Until that time comes, your CDN will handle much of the workload, but location still matters in specific scenarios:

• Latency-sensitive industries: I’m talking about gaming and financial trading, and any sector where even five or 10 milliseconds matter.
• Regulations: China and Russia both have laws that require data localization. Even GDPR, though it doesn’t force localization, indirectly drives businesses to minimize internationalization of data.
• Region-specific websites attracting international visitors: Sometimes, you can’t control waves of German visitors coming to your very specific US-EAST-2 server.
• API-heavy applications and dynamic sites: Online shopping carts are dynamic and, therefore, often need to go back to the origin server. I can say the same about SaaS platforms and apps that run large amounts of API calls.

So, before you assume a CDN will ensure every visitor gets the speediest user experience possible, ask yourself these questions:

Is any of my content dynamic?
Am I beholden to regulations?
Where is my traffic coming from?
And is my industry latency-sensitive?

Here’s the real question I want to answer. You now understand why location still affects SEO and website speed, but what can you do to improve results if you encounter such geographical challenges?

1. Get a reputable CDN: Shoot for a CDN with server coverage near your intended audiences.
2. Track your real latency: Don’t assume your latency is fine because you added a CDN. Measure with tools like WebPageTest, crUX in Search Console, or your CDN’s analytics.
3. Try multi-region origins: Sometimes it’s best to just have multiple origin servers, some of which are closer to certain end users.
4. Optimize your caching: Look into settings for caching API responses, turning on HTML caching, and clearing long-stored cache headers.
5. Test out an edge network: Especially for dynamic content.

Beyond all that, I find it crucial to make your moves with the proper knowledge. Don’t move blindly. It’s common for decision-makers to relocate a server because of a performance issue. But you should always verify that the location is the actual problem before doing so.

Here’s my final advice: Learn to work with the physics of distance. Luckily, CDNs have improved user experiences thanks to their delivery of things like images and JavaScript. But you’ll find that slower load times still affect some users, industries, and locations.

That’s why you should consider workarounds like multi-region origins for dynamic content or edge computing options if you’re in a latency-sensitive industry. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, so optimize based on your audience to improve performance, user experience, and SEO.