Whether you are creating your first website or you already have an established website, it’s likely that you are using or have used shared web hosting. It is one of the most popular hosting options currently available. People are attracted to shared web hosting because of its accessibility, availability, and price.

However, one of the negatives of using this type of hosting is its speed. Granted, a shared hosting plan is not as slow or unreliable as a free plan. However, there is a link between your site’s performance and your shared server infrastructure.

One of the most overlooked elements of optimizing performance is allotted server resources. If you read through the different packages offered by most hosting companies, you will see some big discrepancies in the hosting bandwidth allocated per plan.

In this guide we would like to discuss three steps that you can take to increase your hosting performance, whether you are using a shared hosting service or not.

Finding the Right Hosting Company

Of course, you can use all of the above tips and others to no avail if you do not have a quality hosting company. We strongly recommend that you stay away from free hosting at all costs. Shared hosting is the most affordable option. Depending on the package you purchase, it may offer the features that you need. However, if you are looking for an improved service, dedicated managed hosting may be right for you.

Think of your hosting as your car engine, while you can do everything you want to the exterior of your car or the interior, it won’t go any faster. Your “engine” or host varies in quality based on two important metrics, namely – resources and uptime.

Higher quality hosts will opt for owning their own datacenters and assigning more server resources to their customer’s websites. More server resources essentially means a bigger engine. According to Aussie Hosting’s hosting report, we can see that companies that owned their own datacenters performed almost twice as better than resellers.

When you decide to pick new hosting one of the most important questions is to understand the quality, location and speed of their servers.

Why You Should Use a CDN

When you set up a website, people have the ability to interact with it from anywhere on the planet. All of your information is stored in one physical location, but your images, your videos, and your text still need to travel around the world.

If your site is hosted in New York City, an individual trying to access your site from Boston is going to get access to the content faster than someone who is living in San Francisco or London. The further away your customer is from the data center that is hosting your information, the slower the website will load. This means that users have an inconsistent and often irritating user experience.

This can have a real impact on how customers on the other side of the world view your website. Research says that if your site takes longer than four seconds to load, one quarter of your users are going to abandon the site. If it takes longer than five seconds to load, almost 75 percent of your users will abandon the site if they are using a mobile device. Almost 50 percent of users will not come back to your site if it was performing poorly. All of this can be rectified by using a CDN.

A CDN, or a content delivery network, allows you to deliver the content from your website to people based on their geographic location. With a CDN, there are a number of servers located all over the world. When your website is accessed by an individual who is living in Tokyo, they are going to be connected to a server in Tokyo with the goal of offering the best online experience. You have the ability to cache your content on servers in different locations around the world, thereby allowing your customers to get the best access. CDN’s frequently remove and update content from your site, making sure that the most relevant content is delivered to your visitors.

By using a CDN, you are offering your customers fast load times, you are minimizing the risk of traffic spikes, you are decreasing infrastructure costs, and you are improving your site’s performance.

Optimize Images for Improved Hosting

You find the perfect image for your site, but the file size is large. Sure, it’s going to look beautiful, but your visitors are going to hate your site because of how long it takes this large image to load. It is possible for you to optimize your images to improve your site’s loading speed. You do not have to sacrifice image quality by reducing image size.

Optimizing your images is the process of minimizing their file size. There are scripts and plug-ins that you can use to accomplish this goal. Lossy and lossless compression are some of the options that can be used to this end.

Images are going to make up approximately 21 percent of your website’s weight. You want to find the balance between the smallest file size and the best quality. It is important for you to consider the file format you optimize into as well as the compression that you use.

• PGN is going to produce a higher quality image. It is going to leave you with a larger file size. Although it was initially designed to be a lossless image format, you can use it as a lossy image format. PGN is the best format for simpler images.
• JPEG will also use lossy and lossless optimization. What’s nice about JPEG is that you have the ability to adjust the quality level, which allows you to create the perfect mix of quality and file size. We recommend using JPEG for images that have a ton of the vibrant color.

Optimized images can also be a great boost for SEO.

Compressing JS and CSS

Have you determined that your CSS and JavaScript code is slowing your site down? Don’t worry. You do not need an experienced web developer to help you. These are issues that are relatively easy to fix using a number of readily available tools. The following are a few things that you can do to minify your CSS as well as JavaScript assets.

First and foremost, you need to identify the code that needs to be minified. This means finding characters that only serve the function of improving readability. During the minification process, these excess characters are removed, which reduces the bandwidth needed for your page and increases its loading speed.

PageSpeed Insights is a great tool that makes it possible for you to identify the code that can be minified. The easiest way to accomplish this is to use a CSS or JavaScript minifier. Simply copy and paste the code that you want to optimize into the free tool and then copy the minified code back to your CMS or FTP client interface. Don’t forget to create backups before you make any major changes to the code on your site.

Final Thoughts

Here are a few steps that you can take to improve your hosting performance. Are there other tips that have worked for you? Let us know more about these in the comments section below.