Optimising your website for a shared cloud environment.
Shared hosting environments are the best choice for most businesses these days due to being cost-effective and usually exceeds more than the company needs.
While the web host providers are required (and make every effort) to make sure their servers are very well maintained and kept up to date with the latest security updates requirements.
It is also the responsibility of the business to make sure their website is enhanced and optimised in order to get the maximum performance out of the hosting and website combination.
Some basic tips to help ensure your website is well optimised to get the best performance out of your cloud hosting environment.
The first item to tick off this list is to remove any plugins not being used and installed within your content management system.
Today there are thousands of different free plugins available for some of the most popular content management systems (CMS) like WordPress and it’s very easy to get carried away and start hoarding different plugins.
By installing large amounts of plugins (especially the buggy ones) contributes to a huge drain on server’s resources because it requires additional processing power to continue functioning.
If this might be something you are guilty off. Consider to start taking some time to remove plugins that are unnecessary to the functioning of your website. Doing this will insure your website will run with higher performance and much more smoothly because it is no longer wasting resources by loading plugins that you are never going to actually use.
Always analyse your web traffic.
It’s always very important to start monitoring your website traffic - not only to track the efficiency of your online marketing efforts, but to also understand the performance of your website in general.
Keeping an eye on your website traffic will help you prevent events like sudden spikes in traffic putting a strain on the CPU, memory, and internal storage space that you are sharing with external users because you are on a cloud hosting platform, which results in slower performance on your hosting environment and other users who’s property resides on the same server.
Google Analytics is a fantastic tool to monitor visitors and the activity on your website – and it’s completely free! Hosting platforms such as cPanel also provides great server and website statistics.
Another option you also have within the cPanel hosting platform is using the file compression option. This will reduce the overall size of your website which means there is less data to download to a users web browser when they request to visit your website. This is a great performance enhancment and will also reduce the overall load on the shared cloud hosting server.
Reduce the file size of images placed on your website.
Images on your website are larger in size than text. They use up more space on your hosting account and take much longer to load due to the file size.
You can actually reduce the file size of the images on your website while keeping the same level of quality. There are many free online tools which will enable you to reduce your image file size. By doing this, it will greatly speed up the loading time of your website. Another process you can perform is to make sure you save your images as a JPEG file and this should always be your format of choice.
Two different available tools are Kraken Image Optimiser & Tiny PNG. Both of these can be very helpful.
While many website owners think optimising a website to get the best speed requires an expert, the fact is that anyone can increase the performance of their website by understanding some of the basics and following general good practice.