Server Response Time: Tips on How to Improve Speed

Running a website with slow Server Response Time can hurt your business in more than one way. From impacting your SEO and causing your website to have low rankings, to losing your customers due to slower page uploads resulting in loss of revenue. Therefore, if you are experiencing some of these issues, here are a few tips on how you can improve Server Response Time for better speed.

Hosting Plan and How It Affects Server Response Time

The speed of your website depends much on the type of hosting plan being used. If you’re starting fresh, chances are you are using shared hosting, which is the cheapest solution out there. But as your website grows, having more visitors will require more resources. Upgrading to managed hosting plans like Dedicated or VPS hosting, will greatly increase your sites Server Response Time. The reason why is because your site gets more dedicated resources, without having to share RAM, CPU or bandwidth which you will also get more of.

Optimising Image Size

Sizes of images you are using on your site have a big impact on its overall speed. This basically means bigger in size, slower in speed. There are a few solutions to this problem such as lessening the number of images, decrease their size or not using them altogether. But rather having images then none at all, which can make your site a bit boring. You should optimise image files before uploading. Ways you can achieve this is by compressing, changing the resolution or simply cropping your images.

Optimising CSS and JS Files

When it comes to CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) and JS (JavaScript) files there are generally two ways you can optimise them. One way is by minification which will remove comments or minimise hex code lengths etc. Second option is by zipping or compressing. In order to get the best results it is recommended to use both together. While zipping must be done on a server level, meaning you must be able to configure you server to execute it. For minification on the other hand you can use tools and plugins such as W3 Total Cache, BWP Minify etc.

Applying all or some of these steps will help improve your websites Server Response Time, making it faster, smoother and easy to use. For more information on how you can improve your website and its speed please contact us at www.bytehouse.co.uk/contact.