Introduction

Nobody likes a slow website - with the fast-paced world we live in, users don’t have time to sit and wait for your website to load. The average size of a web page from the top 1,000 websites is now 1.62mb (source). The larger the size of the page, the longer it’s going to take to load - and with more mobile devices than ever being used, you can’t be sure your site is going to be viewed via a high-speed connection.

Users aren’t the only ones that don’t like to wait, according to a post published by them, Google takes speed into consideration when placing a site on search results pages.

No mater how you look at it, the simple fact is speed is important. There are numerous factors that can deteriorate / improve the performance of your website - you’ll find an overview to some of them below. How you actually go about implementing the optimisation techniques will vary depending on your website.

If you have any questions about anything I cover, or would like me to help improve the speed of your website, please contact me.

Hosting environment

Choosing a suitable hosting environment is essential - and the best setup will depend on your scale and budget. As choosing a suitable setup is an in-depth subject itself, I’ll just give a brief overview for now (expect another blog post at a later date).

Generally speaking shared hosting (you know, the packages you see for a few pound a month) often gives you poor performance - you’re sharing a server with hundreds, if not thousands of other sites all trying to use the same limited resources.

A VPS / dedicated server with ample resources (disk, CPU, memory, bandwidth) for the needs of your site & expected traffic which is geographically located as close to your target audience as possible is what you should be aiming for. There are numerous VPS providers available today; I’d recommend Linode - they have data centres in the UK, USA and Japan and recently upgraded the hardware which runs each VPS.

If your target audience is in multiple countries, having a server located in each country (or as close to as possible) and routing each request to the server located as close to the user as possible via a load balancer would be the ideal setup for larger scale sites.

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