How to Make The Most of Your Hosting
It doesn't matter if you've designed a great website that offers up an amazing user experience if your page loads at a snail's pace. This is why both optimization and hosting are so important. These are the factors that help determine how that website is delivered to your visitors. Pages that are unresponsive, slow to load, that chew up mobile bandwidth and data, and that perform poorly on mobile are a real problem. Not only will poor performance drive people away from your site, it also affects your SEO rankings as Google now takes page load times into consideration in its algorithms. Fortunately, there are several things you can do to optimize your site and get the most out of your hosting.
Take Time to Find a Web Host That Meets Your Needs
There are plenty of web hosting services that will host your site for 20 dollars a month or less. Some will even do it for free. That's great if you have a blog that you write for a hundred or so followers, or if you have a family web page. On the other hand, if you have an eCommerce site that needs to host a lot of traffic and bear the weight of multiple transactions, cheap hosting is going to mean a poorly performing website. Eventually, you will lose more revenue than you ever began to save. Go with a hosting plan that matches the intended use of your website. Then, ask them what they can guarantee when it comes to speed and performance.
Use GZip Compression
According to James Wright, owner of Ukwebhostreview.com, "Turning on GZip compression is a simple and easy way to streamline the amount of information that is sent to the browser. In spite of this, many webmasters don't bother turning this feature on." Fortunately, using GTZip compression is usually just a matter of contacting your host and having it turned on for you.
Clean up Your Videos And Images
This is an area where user experience and performance tend to clash. You know that background videos, custom fonts, images, and other goodies are the things that keep your page interesting for your videos. On the other hand, they can also cause significant performance issues. While you certainly don't want to go with a text only website there are a few things that you can do to clean things up.
- Use images and videos only where they will have the biggest impact
- Use web fonts for button and icon text
- Use JPG for photos and larger images
- Use PNG for smaller images
- Use a tool for compressing image size
Remember that every tool and widget you use adds a bit of code to your web pages. This does not mean that you should not use these, but you should pick them judiciously and then frequently perform audits to determine which ones are truly beneficial, and which can be discarded. For example, if you have tapped into a dozen or more advertising affiliates, take some time to determine which ones are the money makers, and then dump the rest. Of course, you should also take a close look at your themes, effects, plugins, and other elements that might be slowing things down. Whenever possible, finding more lightweight versions of these can significantly improve load times. Finally, whatever you do decide to keep, just be sure you check frequently for updates, especially those that improve performance.
Use Tools to Analyze Site Performance
It's virtually impossible to improve site performance when you are simply guessing at where the issues are occurring. A good website analysis tool such as Web Page Analyzer or Google PageSpeed Insights will help you to pinpoint where your biggest issues are. You will get a useful report full of important stats, and in some cases, a few tips on optimizing things. Once you've made the changes you need to improve performance, you can perform the website analysis a second time to see where and if things have improved. Once you have your site performing as desired, run the analysis every so often in order to keep things on track.
Conclusion
Because so many of your users have gone to mobile, and the demand for information that is available immediately is on the rise, website performance is absolutely key. If your site is not up to speed (literally) traffic and revenue are both going to drop significantly. Using the tweaks above, and demanding the best when it comes to web hosting options, will help to ensure that your website zips along no matter how or when people use it. Then, continuing to keep on top of performance issues and making optimization a priority will help to prevent major issues in the future.