Faster servers mean faster websites. This translates to happier online customers, which in turn provide you with better engagement and loyal online following. In a world where attention spans continue to become shorter, a few seconds of load time can make the difference between customer conversion and shopping cart abandonment.
Even Google now takes into consideration website loading speeds when ranking sites. So, it’s in your best interest to focus on server speed if you want to increase visibility online.
You can check website speed to determine whether you need to invest in solutions like a dedicated server or if you just need to optimize your site using the following tips. Having dedicated servers Australia, Europe, US, or any other region can boost your site speed.
1. Caching is Your Friend
The single most important – yet basic – step in improving your server speed is enabling caching. Site owners are able to significantly decrease load time just by doing this.
Every time a user visits your site, your server has to fetch the files requested, retrieve database values, execute application code, and assemble everything into HTML so that your site visitor can read your page. If you have hundreds or thousands of site users, that means your server has to repeat the process hundreds or thousands of times. As a result, your server speed could suffer.
By enabling caching, your server can store all those processes as bits of data in its system memory. So, if the very same data is requested, your server will serve them easily without going through the steps.
2. Put JavaScript Loading on the Back Burner
Thanks to JavaScript, your web users have an interactive and dynamic experience on your site. On the downside, JavaScript files are large and can eat up server memory. To optimize your website’s speed, make sure to prevent large files from loading simultaneously with all the other essential elements of your site.
By putting your JavaScript files on the backburner, your website will load faster.
3. Boost Your Server Response Time
Before you consider using dedicated server hosting, it’s advisable to first determine your server response time. This can be affected by how fast or slow a domain name system (DNS) takes to look up IP addresses. A DNS is a database of hostnames and IP addresses. Think of DNS lookup as similar to the process of finding a specific contact number in a phone book. But instead of a telephone number, the result is an IP address associated with a specific URL.
With this in mind, make sure that your DNS server can quickly perform a lookup of your site. Otherwise, it may be time to change to a faster provider.
4. Defrag Your Server Database Tables
Websites stores site content and all other data in databases. As you add and modify your pages or as visitors post on your site, database tables change. These activities can leave gaps in your databases.
These gaps, called fragmentation, can slow down your server as it will make it slower to fetch the data requested by your site users. This is similar to what happens to your computer when you store and delete data in your system.
The solution is to defrag or perform defragmentation and optimize your server. For at least once a month, run an optimization query to check for fragmentation in your server database tables. Fragmentation levels of at least 5% of your total database size can leave huge gaps and will require optimization via defragmentation.
5. Optimize Settings of Your Database Server
As your website traffic grows and you upgrade plugins and web applications on your site, the number of requests executed by your server also increases. You need to adjust the settings of your database server to keep up with the changes. Otherwise, your server may experience memory bottlenecks that can negatively affect server speed.
6. Cut Down Image Sizes
Many websites, particularly e-commerce sites, require images for improved engagement and customer conversion. This can put many website owners in a dilemma. Very large image sizes can weigh down on your server. And yet, most sites can’t do without images.
Final Thoughts
After all is said and done, optimized server speed translates to having a fast-loading website. You can do that by starting with a professional hosting. You can choose to have your site hosted at multiple locations to allow your business to access connectivity services close to the Network Access Point (NAP).