In this blog post we will talk about a website loading slow, and how it can be fixed. A slow website can negatively impact your SEO. This in turn can decrease your ranking by major search engines like Google and Bing. More importantly, a slow website negatively impacts your conversions, and customer experience, directly impacting your bottom line. Several factors impact website load times, including unoptimized code, large images, disabled compression, redirects, slow hosting, server misconfiguration, etc. In the following paragraphs we will explain what steps are necessary to make your website faster.
Code Optimization
Code optimization is a process of making a program work more effeciently than in previous itterations. A computer program is optimized to execute scripts rapidly, using fewer resources rationally and giving better results. If your website is loading slowly, look at the code first. If there are too many loops, unnecessary functions, and plugins, make changes or remove them altogether. There are a few levels of optimization such as design level, algorithm level, source code, assembly, build, compile level, etc. The developers or DevOPS do the code optimization in most cases. If you are a website owner, contact your developer to make the optimizations. If you are a developer you can do it on your own.
Software Updates
When it comes to software updates, we update software due to security patches and to get new features. The third reason for updates is that it typically comes with better code for improved website performance. If you are using WordPress, Magento, Drupal – anything with plugins, software vendors will often find bugs in their code. Therefore they will releasing new itterations of the plugins, themes, to fix or mitigate these issues. To make your website more secure, faster, and reliable you should always update plugins whenever a new version comes out. You should also update your PHP, Python, Perl, Java, or any scripting language your application is using.
Database optimization
Slow website loading can be caused by a non-optimized database and slow queries. A slow database reduces the database response time, which will reduce the website load. Database optimization involves maximizing the speed and efficiency with which data is retrieved. There are a few database optimization techniques such as indexing, normalization and denormalization, query optimization, partitioning, caching, maintenance, database design, etc. All these optimizations in most cases are done by database admins, or developers who are familiar with databases. The server-related optimization for the database is made by system administrators directly in the configuration of MySQL. To make your website faster check the database because the website data is read by the database with every request.
Image Optimization
High-resolution images, can slow the website loading speed if they are not compressed properly. Image optimization includes image compression using light-image file formats and minimizing the number of image site visitors. The image compression reduces the image detail and size by removing some header info included in the image file. Selecting the best image format for the right purpose is also, a kind of image optimization. Different image formats such as PNG, JPG, WebP or JPEG have their advantages and disadvantages. For online usage typically WebP and SVG are your safest bet. The most effective image optimization method however is image caching. That is a process of storing the image files, within the web browser cache for fast access. For best performance you’ll want to optimize the physical size of the image, the file size, and cache it.
Server-Side caching
Server-side caching is a technique used for storing copies of website data to improve website performance. This includes faster response and reduced load on back-end systems. It allows applications to scale more efficiently, as caching allows them to manage higher traffic. There are different types of server-side caching such as In-memory caches, disk-based caches, and distributed caches. Examples of in-memory caches are the Redis and Memcached. Varnish and Squid caches are disk-based, and for distributed caches, we can mention Amazon ElastiCache and Apache Ignite. Caching files on the server is a very important page speed optimization technique that will make your website load faster. With this technique when users access your site, the server sends cached files, to their browsers. This process speeds up the website several times.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Using a CDN is a powerful tool for improving website performance. The CDN (Content Delivery Network) caches the whole website on multiple servers worldwide. It means that it doesn’t matter where in the world your visitors are located. The website content will be served from the nearest edge server to the user’s location. This will reduce the latency and will increase website loading time. One of the bigger and more popular CDNs is Cloudflare. In addition to speed, it stops malicious traffic before it reaches your server which reduces unnecessary HTTPS requests.
Choose the Right Hosting
One of the most important factors when it comes to hosting a website is to choose high-quality hosting provider. High-quality hosting means that the provider is always using latest generation hardware and guarantees 100% uptime. Your hosting must provide blazing-fast NVMe servers with the latest generation of CPUs.
That’s it! You have learned some basic steps on how you can improve the website loading speed on your server.
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