Why Is Site Speed Important?
The algorithm on Google now incorporates speed-related results when ranking web pages in Google’s search results.
This equates to how fast your page loads on a browser and how easily the website will respond to any incoming traffic or an influx of interactions.
If you have poor performance within either of these areas, then this can drastically impact your website’s ranking on google.
Website’s with poor rankings will receive less visitors and this can impact small businesses significantly.
Due to the improvements in technology over recent years and enhanced website developments, most users have far less tolerance when encountering a faulty webpage and will click off nearly instantly.
The vast majority of users will abandon a website if it does not perform correctly and quickly.
The main difference between shared hosting and other forms of website hosting is that the resources are shared by all of the webpages on a single server.
This limits the storage space for these websites, alongside the RAM and CPU that you can use.
Whilst shared hosting is normally enough to facilitate smaller websites, if you have a high influx of traffic, this may impact upon your website’s performance and speed.
These problems can also be exacerbated if other sites on the server receive a lot of traffic at the same time, and this inherently has a negative impact on everyone else.
The best way to enhance the speed and performance of your shared hosted website and to alleviate the burden of limited resources, is to follow these tips:
1) Enable Your Gzip Compression
The speed of your website will be impacted by how much data it receives and sends.
Gzip compression lowers and shrinks your data by a whopping 90%!
This cuts the waiting time for your website to load drastically and ensures that it responds more effectively.
This compression can also be adjusted and turned on via the control panel, or by easily adjusting the .htaccess file.
2) Use Caching
Websites consist of many different dynamic features and elements.
The more state features are those that remain consistent, whilst the more dynamic features will adjust and change accordingly.
Caching stores static files away from the server so that they are easily able to load.
The best place to store caches is on your device, and these can normally be found within the browser’s cache.
Many control panels will also show you how to easily turn on caching for your website.
When this is not a possibility, you can use a plugin that will enact the same role.
3) Remove Any Unneeded Plugins
Removing any unnecessary plugins is a great way to enhance your website’s performance and speed.
This is because plugins tend to increase the amount of data that is transferred between your website and the visitor’s browser.
If you have many plug-ins, this impact will increase loading and response times for your webpage.
However, if these plugins are essential, then you should keep them in place.
You should discern which plugins are essential and which are not prior to removing them.
You can also remove deactivated plugins that are not in use. Finding alternative
plugins are a great way to enhance the speed and performance of your website.
4) Install A Less Advanced Theme
As technology and websites continue to advance, website developers will use more complicated themes to build them.
Whilst these may offer you a wider breadth of aesthetic options to choose from, they can use a lot of data which takes far longer to load.
Opting for a lightweight theme may be a better option in order to enhance your website’s loading speed.
5) Using A Content Delivery Network
Using a CDN will help to enhance your site speed. This is because the speed of your website can be impacted by how far the data has to transfer in order to reach the user’s browser.
CDN’s are a type of cache that store static features within your website within servers across a variety of locations around the world wide web.
CDN services are paid-for, however, they can definitely help small businesses in order to ensure that their websites perform better internationally.
6) Optimize Your Images
Images are one of the largest forms of files that can be stored on modern websites.
These images are especially data-heavy on online stores, as these tend to contain many of them.
This inherently negatively impacts the website’s speed. Fortunately, you can reduce this unwanted impact by ensuring that you have optimized these images.
In order to do so, you will need to ensure that your images have been saved and uploaded in .jpg or .png format.
You will also need to ensure that these images are not larger than 72 dpi.
It is also crucial to ensure that you are uploading images that are the correct size to suit your theme so that any resized images aren’t generated automatically.
Installing an image-related plugin is the best way to ensure that your images remain optimized properly.
7) Utilize Lazy Loading
Using lazy loading is another means of optimizing images as it staggers the process of image loading.
This staggering process ensures that the most important images are loaded correctly in this first instance.
Any images that follow will appear whenever the most important images have fully loaded.
Using a plugin will help you to implement this process if it is not already included in your website’s theme.
8) Optimize Your Website’s Database
The vast majority of web pages will use databases in order to store any content on the website.
Similarly to a PC, a database may become clogged up with a wide variety of content, including spam comments and unwanted draft posts.
Downloading an optimizing plugin will ensure that your database runs smoothly and efficiently.
9) Upgrade To A Better Hosting Package
If you want a real performance boost, then the best means to achieve this is by upgrading to a far more enhanced hosting solution.
Using a virtual private server is the most obvious evolution from using a shared hosting provider.
A VPS works well with a wide variety of websites, including WordPress.
You will also be able to migrate a webpage succinctly and easily whilst using renowned control panels like cPanel.
What’s even better is that it will only cost you a few dollars more per month whilst providing you with enhanced speed and performance akin to a dedicated server.
Conclusion
To conclude, enhancing your site’s performance and speed on a shared server is essential for ensuring that you achieve better SEO ranking on search engines like Google.
It also ensures that your visitors and customers are able to visit your website without any issues.
However, if you implement these steps and still experience loading issues, then you should consider upgrading to a better hosting package.
I’ve now had this blog for almost a decade. In that time, I’ve learned how to monetize it to start earning money, which servers are the best for each blog type, and how to optimize your domains.
Now it’s time to share my knowledge and help others create their own successful blogs, just like I wish I had when I was creating my first blog. It can be daunting when you first set up your site, but with my advice, you’ll have a great looking blog in no time. Let’s get started!
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