Introduction
Remember being content with a 10-second loading speed for websites? For the RIGHT NOW generation, that’s way too slow. If your site doesn’t load in 3 seconds on a laptop or 2 seconds on a smartphone, you’ve lost a visitor and potential customer. Today, almost every website uses a Cloud server or VPS (virtual private server) as their hosting solution. These servers provide very similar features as dedicated servers, but at a much lower cost. These servers give you great performance, but you can boost it with a few simple tweaks. Before getting into that, it’s important to choose a reliable, trustworthy and affordable Cloud Server or VPS hosting service provider. Otherwise, no amount of boosting can give you the results you want.
What’s the need for speed?
Loading time has been recognised as a big factor in site abandonment. Bounce rate for slow loading sites is high, resulting in visitors experiencing frustration and disappointment with your website – spilling over perhaps into your products/services too. If your competitors have a website that loads faster, you can be sure there’s going to be movement towards them. A study also found that 75% of visitors never return to a website that they previously abandoned due to slow load-speeds. A one-second delay results in customer experience dropping by more than 15% and nearly 40% of people tell friends about bad experiences on a website.
How to accelerate
Here are some ways you can enhance your server speed performance:
- Make sure your Apache configuration is correct. Certain settings can be tweaked to improve performance.
- Track your speed/performance regularly: Identify what could be conflicting your speed.
- Allow caching: You can cut load time by 50% if you find the right combination of caches.
- Select the right application server: Check the installed default servers. Tweak the settings to match your site load.
- Hire an expert: You can purchase server plans from a service provider to help your site stay streamlined.
- Update your MySQL version: Older versions slow down speed, performance and security.
Give Cloud.co.za a call to find out more about how you can be enhancing the speed performance of your server.
