Fast website performance is a crucial element of your online success. It affects the experience of your website users, your SEO rankings, user engagement and conversions, your reputation – pretty much every element of your online presence. To get you on the fast track to a faster site for better online results, Siteground recently posted a short infographic with some quick tips that you can easily apply to your website.
1. Is Your Site Loading Fast Enough?
It is important to check your website speed yourself but also use other tools such as Google Pagespeed insights or GT Metrix. What is a good speed? 1-2 seconds. anything over 3 seconds will increase your bounce rate.
2. Do You Host your site on a server thats close to your main audience?
The closer the server is to the majority of the visitors, the faster your website will load for them. This is very important for local business sites.
With Siteground you can choose from one of their 10 data centrea around the globe. Just go to your client area and move it to a differnt location if needed.
3. Do you target international visitors, users in remote areas and/or does your content change frequently?
You should enable CDN (content Delivery Network).
This keeps copies of your website on different servers around the word, distributing the content to your sites visitors from the point closest to them. At Siteground
they have their own in-house built CDN.
4. Is your site more than one-pager with dynamic content?
MAke Sure You Have fast PHP
MAke sure your PHP is fast by ensuring you are running on the latest (and fastest) PHP version and your web server handles it best way. Siteground have developed custom ultrafast PHP setup. this helps pages load 30% faster compared to a standard PHP setup.
Use Memcached
Memcached is object caching mechanism that speeds up database driven websites. Siteground clients can easily switch on memcached for their website no extra cost.
Use Caching
Caching is a powerful tool to speed up your website, it stores copies data/files in server memory so it can be accessed faster by multiple users. Siteground offer most potent caching solutions with 3 layers NGINX direct delovery (caching static content); Dynamic cache (for full page caching); and memcached (caching of the database queries)
5. Do You have a growing database on your website?
use memcached & fast MySQL setup. Siteground MySQL setup allowes for a large number of requests to be processed simultaneously and brings down the number of slow queries bnetween 10 and 20 times.
6. Do you have images, HTML, CSS on your site?
Optimising Images before uploading is very important! but you can also use compression to reduce files which are delivered from server to browser. some great compression mechanism are gzip and Brotli compression, which need to be available and enable on your hosting server. Brotli compression (Googles nest generation copmpression algorithm) is deployed and enabled by default on Siteground platform.
7. Do You use An optimising plugin?
Siteground optimiser plugin is a simple all in one solution providing caching, frontend, media and environment optimisations.
** Information taken from Sitegorund infographic
*** Please note Siteground links in this article are affiliate links
