Website design is not just about the front end integration, or how the site looks, but the background integration will ensure you can speed up your website with great tools and resources. The best development plan begins with not just how the site looks, but how it runs. When the Obamacare website snafus began to be reported, it was not about the website design on the front end of the site, but he backend or background tools not integrating with this development. The only way to speed up your website is to step back and look at the host, the code, and the function within those tools. Many tools can improve the speed of your website, and make your site zip along for your readers.
Speed up your website with a great host
Where will your site sit? Where will your customers ultimately go to reach your site? When you are developing a new site, chances are you do not have any current customers that use your website yet, so a new site can emerge during the website development easily, and evolve as your front end integration improves. This means you can build your first few pages, navigation among the pages, and you can add the details that your customers need from your online bulletin board. The hours, address, phone number, and map can be accessed on your contact us page, and added with your mission page, about us page, our products, or our services page. Adding pictures, graphics and interactive maps will improve the look of your site, but they will not speed up your website. In fact, having too many pictures, images and graphics is quite distracting and can be a load on your host server account. If you are spending around $15 per month on your host account, do not expect to have a dedicated server for your website use. In fact, you are sharing your server with many domains, and websites. A dedicated or VPS service, will cost you around $100 to $200 per month, with un-managed or managed care packages to be decided upon. As well, a server that is not central to your country or state, can also be a speed hog, if it is located further away than your customers. This is why it is important to use this list when choosing a host:
- Find a host that is geographically close to your customer base
- Do not blindly choose a host based on a superbowl ad or commercial
- Use a host that can work with a separate name registrar for your name domain
- Use local and network support associates to guide you to good hosts that you have found successful
- Use forum sites for reviews on existing nation wide hosts, and chose a server farm close to your location
- Always include managed server support in your host package
- Test your server package with a consultant before you migrate to the server, to ensure they have good response times on up and down loads.
- Backup, security, CDN, cloud architecture and email hosting packages all are on this host. Be sure to discuss your office network needs before you migrate.
- Speed up your website initiative begins with a properly maintained host-you are never done with this change
Speed Up Your Website with CDN File Management
The best way to speed up your website is to integrate your website database with a Content Delivery Network or CDN. There are lots of companies that do this service for free, but the best is CloudFlare. Working within the DNS or Domain Name System, this tool allows you to push your content through a proxy server on their hosted network, and let the internet pull data easily and quickly without a fresh cache each and every trial. The addition of a CDN to your setup will give you a quick download of less than 3 seconds. More than 3 seconds, and your site can be quickly discounted by your readers and customers. Do everything you can to speed up your website to appease your customers as they will be more likely to feel comfortable with your business, when it appears to be a quality run enterprise.
Speed Up Your Website with Google PageSpeed Service
So far, the only expense we have discussed for a newly hatched website, would be hosting and name registration of around $150 total per year. This is not a large expense when you consider your web presence is important for continual business strategy. Adding the CDN from Cloudflare is free, and so is adding google pagespeed service. This service should in fact, be added before your CDN, to ensure that the DNS records are in place before you proxy them. The specifics take just around an hour to install, and with this service, your html, CSS, and other code is actively monitored for effective internet use. Hire a good technical web developer to install this to your server and DNS, and your speed will stay under 3 seconds consistently.
Speed up your website and speed up your business at the same time-it is a task that any existing or new website must consider.