Is a load balancer worth it to improve Google rankings?
My site is hosted on Hetzner in Frankfurt, which is mostly fine for Europe and Israel, but the latency from the US is 500-1000ms. Around 90% of my traffic (which is 3-5k user sessions per day) comes from Europe and Israel, but I expect that the US people might be interested in my site's content as well.
Can anyone please advise - does it make sense to add a server in the US and a load balancer to reduce latency and improve my site's Google rankings in the US, or it's just not worth the pain? Technically, it doesn't seem difficult - the site is just a Clojure web app powered by a Mongo database with very infrequent writes.
Would appreciate any help.
The easiest thing to do is setup Cloudflare (https://www.cloudflare.com/)
They'll cache and minify everything and improve load speed. Try running Page Speed Test before and after:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Hope this is helpful!
Thank you for the response!
I used Cloudflare to cache pictures, JS and CSS but now after your advice, I started looking how I can use it to cache my pages (most of which are static) too.
The problem is that I sometimes use cookies to serve different content but Cloudflare only allows to bypass cache on cookie only for Business users - US$200/month is not something I'm ready to pay right now. Just in case, do you know if there are cheaper alternatives?
A loadbalancer would just randomly split traffic between servers.
What you need is geographical routing, aka send US visitors to a US server and Europeans to your Hetzner server.
If you use AWS route 53, that is very easy to set up and costs very little (your servers dont have to be at AWS) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/routing-policy.html#routing-policy-geo.
Given that most of your traffic is close to your server it might not be worth the effort tho.