The First Hello: Why Your Website Starts Loading Before the Click

DNS latency is the amount of time it takes for a DNS nameserver to translate a human-readable domain (like yourbusiness.ie) into a machine-readable IP address. This process, known as a DNS lookup, must be completed before a browser can even request the first byte of data from your web server.

A typical DNS lookup takes between 20 and 120 milliseconds. While that sounds insignificant, those milliseconds are “blocking” time. The browser is essentially frozen until it gets the answer. If your DNS is poorly configured or hosted on slow, distant servers, that lookup can spike to 300 milliseconds or more. This creates a noticeable “hitch” in the loading process that users feel as a delay before the page even starts to render.

Most businesses use the default DNS services provided by their domain registrar. These are often treated as an afterthought by the provider, bundled for free to keep the registration price low. Because these “free” nameservers are often overloaded and lack a globally distributed network, they become a single point of failure for your site’s performance.

When you use a basic Unicast DNS network, your domain’s information lives in one specific location. If a user in Cork is trying to reach a site whose DNS is sitting on a budget server in the US, that request has to travel across the Atlantic just to find out where the website is located. This adds unnecessary physical distance to the “first hello,” and it happens every time a new visitor arrives.

High-performance DNS, like the infrastructure we use at SmartHost, utilises Anycast networks. This means your DNS records are replicated across multiple global locations. The user is automatically directed to the closest server, reducing the physical distance and cutting the lookup time by up to 50%.

Google’s ranking algorithms have shifted heavily towards “User Experience” through a set of metrics called Core Web Vitals. The most important of these for speed is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures how long it takes for the main content of a page to appear.

DNS latency directly impacts LCP. Because the DNS lookup is the first step in the loading chain, any delay here pushes the entire timeline back. A 200ms delay in DNS resolution is a 200ms delay in your LCP score. If you are struggling to move your site from “Needs Improvement” to “Good” in Google Search Console, your DNS resolution time might be the invisible weight holding you back.

Furthermore, if your DNS is unreliable, search engine bots may encounter “DNS timeouts” when trying to crawl your site. If Googlebot cannot resolve your domain, it cannot index your pages, which can lead to a sudden and mysterious drop in search visibility.

Improving your DNS performance is one of the most cost-effective ways to speed up your website because it requires no changes to your site’s code.

1. Use a High-Performance DNS Provider: Switch from basic registrar DNS to a provider that uses a redundant, high-availability network. SmartHost provides managed DNS that is engineered for speed and stability on Irish soil.
2. Optimise Your TTL (Time to Live) Settings: The TTL tells browsers how long to “remember” your DNS record before asking again. For stable records, a TTL of 1 to 4 hours is often ideal, as it allows for frequent caching without making your site difficult to update.
3. Minimise Third-Party Lookups: Every time you load a font from Google, a tracking script from Meta, or a video from YouTube, the browser has to perform another DNS lookup for those domains. Audit your site and remove unnecessary external scripts that add to your total lookup count.