5 Tips to Speed Up Your Website

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Studies show that people will abandon your website if it does not load in at least 4 seconds. Yes, now days online users are very impatient and will move one fairly quickly to another site.

Speed in my opinion is the second most important aspect after search engine optimization which gets people to your site. Lets say you have optimized you site very well and and you are getting quite a bit of traffic but once people get there and wait its of no use.

So here hare some useful tips to boost your website speed:

  1. Get a dedicated server with at least 1GB of RAM
  2. Enable MySQL query cache for website with lots of queries
  3. Serve images, JavaScripts, CSS files form a cookieless domain or CDN
  4. Use less code in your pages and dont clutter it with unnecessary applicatons you dont need. Simple
  5. Scale images so the browser does not have to do it and determine the size. Less steps for the browser the better it is for you. 

There are plenty other speed factors but these are some good ones to get you started. If you need any help please feel free to contact us.

How to Speed Up & Optimize Your Website The Best Way You Can

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First thing that any website owner has to keep in mind is SPEED. Optimizing your site so that it loads in less than 5 seconds should be the main goal. Ever notice some websites that you land on but take forever to load and you hit the back but faster than the website loads! Well, thats not good. Your chances of having lost that customer are pretty high.

Most companies spend so much time and resources designing a top-notch website but fail to address one simple thing – page load. There is no point of having a great and useful website if it loads super-slow and people cant get to it. The average time a person spends on a page is about 8 seconds and if the site takes more than 10 seconds too load, that person is gone in no time without even waiting for it to load.

So what causes the webpage to load so slow ?

There are a few factors and it really depends on the websites structure bu the most common are:

  • Too many images that are not saved for the web (e.g banner.jpg 890 KB) 
  • Heavy usage of JavaScript 
  • Bad choice of web application platform ( e.g CMS, Shopping Cart, etc)
  • Server performance ( shared hosting, not enough RAM)
  • Poor coding structure that does not flow correctly

This is just the top of the surface and there are too many other aspects of website optimization and we cant list them all here.

Below are some quick tips for website optimization for and improve page loading times :

  1. Compress all of your scripts including all CSS, Javascripts files and externally reference them.
  2. Create a cookie-less subdomain and host all of your images there so you are not appending unnecessary cookies to the images. (Do the same for css and js files)
  3. Get a VPS server or Dedicated server with at least 712MB in RAM
  4. Separate your database from your local web server to a different server but make sure there is not latency. ( this one is complicated)
  5. Disable Apache modules that you don’t need as Apache is memory hungry and will take up RAM
  6. If using php add application accelerators such as xcache, eaccelerator, zend

Optimizing your website for faster page load is an ongoing process that requires a lot of work but that its worth it at the end because FASTER website equals more customers which leads to more revenue.

If you can’t do this on your own and are looking to hire a developer to do instead, please email me at don@tripleroi.com to discuss the details.

Choosing A Web Hosting Server – Where to Begin ?

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Nowadays your web hosting company plays a critical role in your website’s economic performance. Download speed of your server is the number one reason which impacts how your web pages load. Lets say a customer comes to your website and waits almost a minute for the site to load and then after painfully waiting that long click on a second page and waits another minute. Guess what ? You just lost that customer. Well most hosting companies offer shared hosting at a reasonable price even at $3 per month but as you might have guessed its that old saying “you get what you paid for”. Choosing the right company which offers a great service, technical support and tons of memory, hardrive, bandwidth is surprisingly very difficult. Why? Because many companies try to oversell their packages to get the most out of their hosting plans and your website is paying the price for that by not having enough resources as a result experience downtown or slow loading.

There are three types of poplar hosting server plans out there:

Shared Hosting ( numerous of website into one server box )
VPS Hosting ( Not as many websites into one box )
Dedicated Hosting ( Only one website in the box )

Obviously, going with a dedicated server is the best solution but price is the only concern on this one as it tends to be on the high-end.

Also, another thing that is important to mention is that shared hosting is fully managed by the hosting company white VPS and Dedicated come either partially managed or unmanaged so you will have to worry about all the headaches that come with it such as security patches, updates, server errors etc.

Honestly, we’ve seen too many websites that suffer from being on a bad server that really impacted their online/offline revenue.

If you need help with selecting a hosting provider or just looking to transfer to a new server we can help you with the process and recommend the best solution for your business.

Cloud computing Vs CDN ( Content Delivery Network ) – Difference

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Many times we get asked from users what is the difference between Cloud computing and CDN?
Which one to choose ?

The big difference is that cloud computing is a big group of servers in 1 data center building which is usually at one location. On the other hand CDN is also group of servers but distributed around the country so it allows web visitors a better and faster access to the website. For example if you’re in Boston trying to access a server in California it can be faster to be hitting a server locally in Boston for the files. The CDN is usually able to support much larger traffic volumes since the speed is calculated based on location the traffic comes from.

So which one to choose it really depends on your budget and the amount of traffic your website gets.

Cloud computing Vs CDN ( Content Delivery Network ) - Difference