Five Ways To Speed Up Your Website

In our speedy everyday lives, how quickly a website loads and responds is an important determinant of how long we choose to interact with it. You can put great effort into the layout, design, and navigation; you can slave over the content until it is just about perfect; if the pages get stuck often or load at what is reminiscent of prehistoric 56-Kb modem speeds, your actual audience will shrink and eventually approach zero. Timely retrieval and availability are essential for enhancing interactivity. Here are a few tips on how to drastically improve your website’s speed.

Stash it in a Cache

Web caching allows for the temporary storage of web page documents, images, and other objects. The cache acts like a sieve: it holds on to the web content that passes through it and satisfies further requests without the need to re-download the same content, thus reducing bandwidth usage, retrieval time, and server load. Think of Google Search’s cached pages – they load far faster than the direct links, and they remain accessible for a time even after the original has been taken down. WordPress’s W3 Total Cache solution, for instance, boasts 10-fold improvement in site performance overall.

Ram up the RAM

It is true for your old desktop, and it is also true for your server: jacking up the RAM brings a stark difference in performance. The main improvement you will see when you increase your server’s RAM is a reduction in the I/O operations because more data stay available in the memory, and the drives do not need to repeat requests they already fulfilled once during a session. If you have a choice between increasing CPU power or memory, the latter is your best bet for a notable improvement in speed.

Minify, Minify, Minify

An obvious move towards better functionality is to reduce the file sizes of images and other objects which are embedded in your webpages. This speeds up retrieval time and keeps the cache and the RAM less cluttered. You can also engage in minification, which is the process of removing unnecessary characters from your source code. Such characters signify white spaces and new lines and also include comments and other optional code elements. Minification is widely used in JavaScript (see JSMin for one application example) but also features in HTML, greatly reducing page size across the board.

Choose Solid State Drives (SSDs) for Solid Performance

SSDs offer roughly 100 times more random read/write input/output operations per second compared to conventional hard drives. Because they do not contain any mechanical components and rely on integrated circuit assemblies instead, SSDs do not succumb to the usual “thrashing” syndrome of regular HDDs, which eventually lose speed and perish due to wear and tear of their moving parts. Elastic hosts is one company that offers SSD servers located in London, California, Toronto, Hong Kong, and Australia. You can pick the server closest to you and specify the size you need. The client testimonials are truly raving!

Put Your Website up in the Cloud

Cloud hosting is taking off in a really big way. With improved reliability and instantly scalable resources, it reduces your reliance on hardware in a single location. The many cloud hosting services available today offer ever increasing resilience and server performance. Hosting your website in the cloud also makes it much less susceptible to a range of common problems, from hardware fails to natural disasters.

These are some great avenues to pursue when you are looking for ways to provide users with a smooth browsing experience which lets your brilliant content shine. Integrating some of these solutions is also an option, of course, and it delivers even better results.

This article was written by Jenny a tech blogger from London, she specializes in helping businesses maximize the efficiency of their websites.