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Cloud Hosting is undeniably one of the fastest web hosting services available for your website. However, to get the best out of the cloud, you must ensure that you optimize your hosting solution. By following the four tips given below, you can be assured of faster and better-performing website.
1. Reduce the third-party assets
Do you use social media widgets, web fonts, or advertising and tracking scripts on your website? If yes, then you are using third-party assets and they can affect the performance of your website since they require data from an outside server to run. Try to reduce the number of such assets on your website and only run what is necessary to improve speed and performance and wherever possible, cache the data. Which brings us to the second tip…
2. Caching
Caching is the best way to improve the load speed of your website/pages. It simply means creating static HTML versions of your webpage to avoid querying the database all the time. Caching is particularly helpful for pages with static information like ‘Contact Us’ page or the ‘About Us’ page. While there are many tools and plugins available for caching, it would be better to look for a cloud hosting provider who offers a reverse caching proxy (like Varnish) with the plan. Varnish cache has the capacity to increase the speed of the website by 1000%.
3. MySQL queries
If after following the first two tips, you still don’t see a significant change in the site performance, then it’s time to get the coding team involved and run a check on the MySQL queries. Look for the response time of the queries. IF the queries are taking longer to return the information desired, then the website will take longer to load. This can be a huge problem if your website generally experiences heavy traffic.
4. Image Optimization
Images and rich media are the heaviest elements a website can have. Because of this, they also have the tendency to slow down the speed of the website as it takes longer to get the request-response cycle complete. That being said, it is always a good idea to optimize images by various techniques. First things first, compress the images using lossless compression techniques. This will ensure that the quality of the image does not go down and you also reduce their size. Apart from that be sure to cache the images both at a server-side level and at the browsers. Moreover, make use of Image Sprites so that the calls to images on a webpage can be done efficiently within one request-response cycle.
Summing up
While there are other ways of optimizing hosting and improve the performance of your website, you must ensure that all options have been explored and implemented. Availing the services and buying a suitable plan from a good Cloud Hosting provider is also a part of the optimization process. Make sure that the hosting provider offers caching and Content Delivery Network (CDN) services to help you optimize the performance of your website. Rest of the benefits which are inherent to Cloud Hosting will be made available by all the Cloud Hosting providers.