Many customers in today’s modern business world have grown accustomed to finding what they want online. They anticipate prompt services and comfort when they visit your website.
When clients visit your website rather than your physical store, they evaluate many factors, the most essential of which is time. You, as the business owner, should not keep them waiting either. Your website should not take long to load; else, customers may become frustrated and leave.
When your site is slow, more than 75% of online shoppers prefer to go to a competitor’s site to receive the service you might easily sell. Visitors to your website expect it to load in 3 seconds or less. A site that takes more than 3 seconds to load has 22% fewer views, 50% more refusals, and 22% fewer conversions than a site that takes only 1 second to load.
While having an online presence might help your business get noticed, ensuring that your site provides the greatest user experience possible by enhancing server speed is critical. This will offer you a competitive advantage.
Numerous companies regularly employ several strategies to optimize their servers and ensure they satisfy their websites’ requirements for functionality, accessibility, availability, and other factors.
Optimizing the server has a direct impact on how well every website performs. The key recommendations you can apply to improve the performance of your server are compiled in this post.
What is a server?
A server is a piece of hardware or software that process requests sent over a network.
Servers deliver content to users by storing, processing, and delivering it. A web browser, such as Google chrome, or firefox, will use HTTP to request a file that is stored on a server.
The HTTP server will accept the request after the web server receives it, find the requested content, and provide it to the browser through HTTP.
What is server optimization?
The term “server optimization” refers to a group of techniques used to boost a server’s overall performance and speed and the effectiveness of its data processing and application configuration.
When a customer browses your website, the server determines how quickly they receive a response. The response time is accelerated via server optimization. This also enables companies to maintain a highly effective operational and optimal application delivery network.
Signs a business should utilize server optimization
The network should operate at its highest efficiency level when a company depends on its accessibility and use for day-to-day operations.
You must be vigilant or, better yet, seek feedback from your users regarding their experience with your website because it may not always be clear when server or server traffic performance degrades.
The indicators or signs below indicate that a business should use server optimization to boost performance.
- Users suffer server issues that degrade their experience
- Conversion rates fall and high bounce rates
- Websites take longer than they should load
- The website is occasionally unresponsive
- Your server goes down during the flow of customers
- Certain applications like VoIP have difficulty running properly
If any of these signs occur, it is likely that the server has gotten overloaded and cannot fulfill critical functions.
The website’s availability will deteriorate further, and the server will be unable to handle its normal traffic volume. This is why server optimization is required.
Benefits of optimizing your server
Optimizing your server offers your business many benefits.
01). Improve customer service
Consider a website that takes too long to load. Will customers return, or will they go owing to a poor user experience? You may lose potential customers. You can provide better client service if you optimize your server.
02). Increase productivity
Making sure your server is optimized can lead to significant boosts in productivity. When your server is up and operating, your site can be responsive and constantly available. This ensures that your site’s productivity is unaffected.
03). Allows you to handle peaks effectively
Your website may grow popular and begin to receive more visitors. During this period, your server should be able to manage a high number of visitors without slowing down your site.
When your server is optimized, you can be confident that it can handle large traffic volumes during peak periods or as your organization expands.
04). Get more out of your server
Optimizing your server is critical since it allows you to get more out of it. It actively analyzes your website’s functionality, security, availability, and other procedures.
Furthermore, optimized servers increase your speed, which helps you rank higher in search engines and increase your conversion rates.
05). Boost sales
When a site is slow, more than 75% of online shoppers choose to visit your competitor’s site. Once your server has been optimized, your website can begin to load quickly.
This helps you retain clients by providing a positive user experience; potential buyers from slow-loading sites can make purchases through your quick-loading site. As a result of your sales increase.
Tactics to optimize your server for performance
As we’ve seen, improving your server is critical to the success of your business. Below are some tactics you can use to optimize your server performance.
#1. Examine your present hosting provider
If you’re wondering why your server is slower or how to speed up your slow server, your hosting provider could be a potential source of speed issues.
There are three types of hosting available. Shared hosting, virtual private servers, and dedicated servers.
Shared hosting; is the most cost-effective choice, but because hosting resources are shared across several sites, overall performance suffers. As a result, they will undoubtedly cause issues if your site has surged in traffic or a constant volume of high traffic.
Although virtual private servers logically divide servers on a common physical drive to increase efficiency, they nevertheless experience speed concerns when resource loads are high.
On the other hand, dedicated servers are more expensive than shared or virtual private servers. They will, however, considerably increase your speed independently of the resource load.
It’s easier to find a dependable hosting company than to buy to fix a slow server. As a result, you should begin by acquiring a server from a reputable hosting provider.
#2. Cache your website.
A cache is a high-speed data storage layer that saves a portion of data, often temporary, so that future requests for that data can be delivered faster than accessing the data’s primary storage location.
Pages no longer need to send database requests because the data has been cached. They can simply send a processed result to the user.
There are various methods for caching your website
The Opcode cache contains the results of earlier page requests.
Memory cache: This keeps bits of data generated by programs in system memory and serves the piece of data without the requirement for processing when the same bit of data is requested. It is faster than Opcode and is recommended for high-load balanced sites.
HTTP cache: web server proxy servers that save entire HTML pages. It is by far the fastest and best suited for high traffic with tiny web apps.
The application cache can be used with any of the caches listed above.
#3. Optimize your images
Images can make your website interesting and memorable, but they can also add weight to pages and slow them down. Large image files on your site can cause your server to respond slowly. Image optimization allows you to optimize the speed and performance of a website. Always compress your images before uploading them to your site.
#4. Use fewer plugins
Plugins can provide various useful features to assist you in managing your website.
However, having too many of them installed might be detrimental to your website because they will slow down your server response time. Remove any unwanted plugins and always examine whether the benefits of the plugins are worth installing before installing them.
#5. Database optimization
Database optimization is a technique for reducing database system response times and improving website performance.
Your database will gather new information and eliminate outdated information over time. This can lead to database gaps and lengthier query execution times on your server. This is frequently referred to as fragmentation.
To improve server performance, address fragmentation in database tables that is more than 5% of their total size once a month. In this manner, you may prevent your site from running sluggishly.
#6. Consider the content delivery network
Initial and ongoing load times suffer when all of the data required to load your site completely is kept in one location. This is where CDN comes in handy.
A CDN is a geographically distributed network of servers collaborating to provide internet content quickly. To maximize content delivery, the CDN chooses the server closest to the user’s physical location whenever they visit your site.
#7. Update any programs you use on your server
Updating any programs on your server to maintain optimal performance software updates provide the most recent bug fixes and speed optimizations. They allow you to increase the overall speed of your server.
#8. Optimize your DNS speed
DNS is an abbreviation for domain name servers. Regarding loading time, DNS query response time for a site is 30 milliseconds or fewer, but many sites exceed the 200 milliseconds mark for DNS resolution.
As the distance between the browser and the DNS server grows, so will the execution time. If your DNS speeds are poor, you should consider moving to a domain provider with better DNS server response times.
#9. Minify your scripts
Your website comprises several files such as HTML, javascript, and CSS code. When users try to access specific files on websites with a large number of CSS, and Javascript files, many HTTP requests are generated.
This can hurt the speed of the user’s browser and website’s speed. It is critical to minify your code scripts. This approach will reduce the size of the files increasing the site’s speed and overall performance.
#10. Virtualization.
Servers virtualization is the act of dividing a physical server into many virtual servers using the software. These virtual servers are separated and capable of running their operating systems. The physical server may now execute many operation systems and servers simultaneously thanks to server virtualization.
Conclusion
Accelerating page load has a huge impact on web server performance.
The faster your website loads, displays content, and responds to user input, the higher your conversion, and lower bounce rates will be. Fortunately, there are numerous factors available to assist you in optimizing your server for performance.
Server optimization influences overall site performance, affecting the company’s reputation among users and customers.
Related: