Here are some tips for website and blog owners
If you’re a subscriber to Virtual Private Hosting, perhaps through a service such as UK2 VPS Cloud Hosting, then no doubt one of your prime considerations will be page-loading times. When your business operates in a competitive marketplace, the speed at which your pages open, both above the fold and below, is all-important. Even a fraction of a second can make all the difference as Google itself has pointed out – website visitors will often abandon a page if it takes longer than six seconds to load.
VPS Cloud hosting is often recommended for several qualities. Websites should load faster than on a standard shared server. It’s reliable, because if one server goes down, your site can be instantly moved to another with no noticeable downtime. It offers more security and privacy than a shared server also, and it’s quick to set-up – from signing a contract to having your site up-and-running can take no more than a few hours. VPS hosting gives you more control over your website at administrator level – for instance, there may be a wide choice of operating systems you can use, and you should have a lot more flexibility over the way it’s configured. And when compared to a dedicated server, it’s inexpensive.
So there’s a lot to be said for going with a VPS option, but as your business grows, you also need to pay attention to the performance of your site. More website traffic equals more requests which can lead to pages loading more slowly. Here’re some tips on how you can enhance things…
Caching Data
Temporarily storing your most frequently-accessed web data to the RAM can make your pages load faster and reduce latency – it’s one of the easiest fixes you can make to the VPS. There are many options when it comes to installing caching software so no need to jump on the first available.
Pruning Applications
Some Virtual Private Servers come with pre-installed applications, many of which you may not actually need. These could be slowing down functions unnecessarily so spend some time looking at what’s on there right now, and remove or disable anything you don’t want. You can always reactivate them as and when.
Optimizing Content
You should ensure that all of your on-site content is optimized with the aim of making things run as smoothly and efficiently as possible. You can utilize analytic software such as Google PageSpeed to identify any problem areas, such as certain pages that load slower than others, and the reasons behind them. The software should also offer solutions, at least in network-independent areas like images and the HTML structure.
Moving to a CDN If you’re serving global markets over multiple locations worldwide, then you may want to think about using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which is a linked system of distributed servers to help your pages load faster by cutting the distance the data needs to travel.
If you’re serving global markets over multiple locations worldwide, then you may want to think about using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which is a linked system of distributed servers to help your pages load faster by cutting the distance the data needs to travel. In essence, if someone wants to access your website from China then they will be sent the data from your server to Beijing, rather than the one in London that is serving to your site visitors from Western Europe.
Updating MySQL
Look at your MySQL – if it’s outdated then you’ll need to install the latest version to improve your speed and also, critically, your security. This fix can also prevent technical issues from occurring, so it generally helps with the user experience.
Reconfigure Apache
Around 50% of all active web servers use Apache software because it is so high-performance in reducing latency and processing requests. But if the software is not configured correctly then it can impair website function and slow things down. You can tweak the settings and functions to get the results you need.
