Selling Internationally? How Server Location Affects Your Overseas Customers

Server location for international ecommerce is the strategic decision of where your website's server physically sits and how that location affects the experience of customers in different countries. Data has to travel between your server and each visitor's browser, and distance adds latency. If your server is in London and your customer is in Sydney, every single request adds roughly 250–300ms of delay — and that delay compounds across an entire shopping session. Understanding server location is central to your server response and hosting strategy.

This is not a minor technical detail. If your analytics show significant traffic from countries far from your server, those visitors are getting a materially slower experience than your local customers — and they are converting at a lower rate because of it.

The Real Cost of Distance

Here is what typical server response times look like when your origin server is in London, UK, tested from different regions:

Visitor Region	Approx. Round-Trip Latency	Impact on a 50-Request Page	Real-World Effect
UK	10–20ms	Minimal	Baseline experience
Western Europe	20–40ms	+0.5–1s total	Barely noticeable
Eastern Europe	40–60ms	+1–2s total	Slightly slower, still acceptable
US East Coast	70–90ms	+2–3s total	Noticeably slower
US West Coast	130–150ms	+3–5s total	Significantly slower
Middle East	80–120ms	+2–4s total	Noticeably slower
Southeast Asia	170–200ms	+4–6s total	Poor experience without CDN
Australia/NZ	250–300ms	+5–8s total	Unacceptable without CDN
South America	180–220ms	+4–7s total	Poor experience without CDN
Sub-Saharan Africa	150–250ms	+4–7s total	Highly variable, often poor

These latencies apply to every HTTP request. A typical page makes 30–80 requests for HTML, images, CSS, JavaScript, and fonts. Without a CDN, every one of those requests pays the full distance penalty.

How This Affects Your Conversion Rate

The relationship between latency and conversion is well-documented. Research from Akamai found that a 100ms delay in load time reduces conversion rates by approximately 7%. For overseas visitors experiencing 200–300ms of additional latency per request, the cumulative effect on a multi-page session is significant.

Consider a UK ecommerce site generating £50,000/month with 15% of traffic from Australia:

• Australian traffic accounts for roughly £7,500/month in potential revenue
• Without a CDN, Australian visitors experience 3–5 seconds of additional cumulative latency across a session
• A 20–30% reduction in conversion rate for Australian traffic represents £1,500–£2,250/month in lost sales
• A free CDN (Cloudflare) eliminates most of this latency for zero cost

The maths is straightforward: if you have meaningful international traffic and no CDN, you are leaving money on the table.

When a CDN Is Sufficient

For most small and mid-size businesses, a CDN solves the server location problem adequately:

A CDN is enough when:

• Static content (images, CSS, JS, fonts) makes up the majority of your page weight — true for most sites
• Your checkout and cart functionality works acceptably from your origin server
• You are not running heavy server-side personalisation for international visitors
• Your international traffic is less than 30–40% of total traffic

A CDN caches static content on servers worldwide. Since static content accounts for 80–90% of most pages' total weight, this eliminates the distance penalty for the vast majority of data transferred. The HTML document itself still comes from your origin server, but it is typically small (10–50KB) and the latency for a single request is manageable.

Recommendation: Start with Cloudflare's free CDN. This covers most businesses. Only consider more complex solutions if performance remains inadequate after CDN implementation.

When You Need More Than a CDN

A CDN alone may not be sufficient when:

Heavy Dynamic Content

If your pages are highly personalised — dynamic pricing, real-time stock from multiple warehouses, personalised recommendations based on browsing history — the dynamic portions of each page still come from your origin server. If these dynamic elements are above the fold and affect LCP, distant visitors will still experience slow page loads.

Solutions: Server-side caching of common dynamic responses, edge computing (Cloudflare Workers, AWS Lambda@Edge, Vercel Edge Functions), or multi-region database replication.

Checkout Latency

The checkout process involves multiple server round-trips: validating the cart, calculating shipping, processing payment, and confirming the order. Each step requires communication with your origin server. For distant customers, these round-trips add up.

Solutions: Use payment providers with global infrastructure (Stripe processes payments through regional servers automatically). Pre-validate shipping options and cache them. Minimise the number of server round-trips in your checkout flow.

Search and Filtering

On ecommerce sites, search queries and filter operations require database queries on your origin server. If your product catalogue is large and your search is server-rendered, distant visitors experience noticeable delays when searching or filtering.

Solutions: Client-side search indexing (Algolia, MeiliSearch), CDN-cached filter results for common combinations, or edge-based search functionality.

Multi-Region Hosting

For businesses where a CDN is genuinely insufficient, multi-region hosting places your application and database on servers in multiple geographic locations:

Approach	Complexity	Cost	Best For
CDN only	Low	Free–£20/month	Most businesses
CDN + edge functions	Medium	£20–£100/month	Dynamic content optimisation
Multi-region application	High	£200–£1,000+/month	Large international ecommerce
Full multi-region with DB replication	Very high	£500–£5,000+/month	Enterprise-scale global operations

Most small businesses should start with a CDN and only consider multi-region hosting if measurable performance problems persist for international visitors.

Connecting to International SEO

Google measures page speed using real user data from visitors in each country. Your Core Web Vitals scores are calculated per-market, not globally. This means:

• If your LCP passes for UK visitors but fails for Australian visitors, your rankings in Australian search results are affected
• Google's mobile-first indexing applies in every market — mobile speed in each country matters
• Hreflang tags tell Google which version of your page to show in each market, but speed still affects ranking within that market

If international organic traffic is a growth channel for your business, server performance by region is directly tied to your SEO results in those regions. Our guide on international SEO for small business covers the broader strategy, including hreflang implementation and multi-currency setup.

What to Check Right Now

1. Check your traffic by country — Open Google Analytics → Audience → Geo → Location. Which countries contribute meaningful traffic? If any country contributing over 10% of your traffic is more than 5,000km from your server, investigate CDN options.

2. Test from international locations — Use KeyCDN Performance Test or Dotcom-Monitor to test your site from your customers' regions. Compare the TTFB from each location to your local TTFB.

3. Verify CDN coverage — If you already have a CDN, check whether static assets are being served from edge locations. In Chrome DevTools, look for CDN-specific response headers (e.g., cf-cache-status: HIT for Cloudflare).

4. Check checkout performance internationally — If you sell online, test the checkout flow from an international location using a VPN or a tool like BrowserStack. If each step feels slow, your checkout is not adequately cached or optimised for distance.

Next Steps

Server location is a physics problem — data cannot travel faster than the speed of light through fibre. But a CDN effectively solves this for the vast majority of your page content, and more advanced solutions exist for the rest.

If you have international customers and no CDN, start there — the free tier from Cloudflare covers most businesses. If you already have a CDN and international visitors still experience poor performance, investigate whether dynamic content is the bottleneck.

For a complete international performance assessment, talk to us about an SEO audit. We test your site from your customers' locations, identify where distance is costing you speed, and recommend the right infrastructure for your traffic patterns.

Questions about server location and international performance? Get in touch.