Why your website is slow from Miami (and how to fix it)
Most St Martin and St Barts websites are hosted in mainland France. The result — 6 to 8 seconds of waiting for your American customers. Here's the concrete explanation, and the fix.
Run the test right now: open pagespeed.web.dev and enter your website's address. If the mobile score is under 50, this article is about you.
The problem: your site lives 4,500 miles from your customers
Most websites in Saint-Barthélemy and Saint-Martin are built on shared hosting located in mainland France — the default choice of generalist agencies and mass-market platforms.
But your customers are not in mainland France. They are in Miami, New York, Toronto — or already on the island, connected through links that often route through the United States. Every page they request has to cross the Atlantic, sometimes dozens of times per view (images, fonts, scripts…).
The result is measurable: 6 to 8 seconds to display from Miami for a typical shared-hosting site. And Google published the number that hurts: past 3 seconds, more than one mobile visitor in two gives up. Those visitors don't come back — they book with the competitor next door.
The fix: stop making your pages cross the ocean
The right approach is not to "optimise" a badly-placed site, but to distribute it: generate the site as static files, then place a copy on dozens of servers across the world — Miami for the Caribbean and the Americas, Paris or London for Europe.
Each visitor is then served by the server nearest to them. The page no longer crosses the planet: it's already next door. Concretely:
- Under 2 seconds to display, in Miami as in Paris;
- a 90+ PageSpeed score, measurable by you at delivery;
- no server maintenance, no security updates to babysit.
What about search rankings?
Speed is a Google ranking factor — but it isn't the whole story. A fast site written only in French remains invisible to an American typing "best restaurant St Martin". A native English version (not machine-translated) and hreflang tags are part of the same job: existing on both of your markets.
Nobody can guarantee you Google's first page — beware of anyone who promises it. What can be guaranteed is what can be measured: speed, indexation in both languages, clean technical foundations.
Studio Lagon builds globally-distributed websites for St Martin and St Barts businesses — see packs and pricing, or request a free audit of your current site through the contact form.