Shared hosting is the perfect choice for startups and small to medium businesses that do not encounter high amounts of traffic. However, being the starter hosting package, it might not provide the same quality of performance and speed that its more upgraded counterparts will such as VPS and managed dedicated hosting. However, there are several things you can do to boost the speed of your shared hosting package.
Let’s take a look at some of them.
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Choose the server nearest to your audience
Whenever someone visits your website, they send a request to the server to be able to access all of the content on your website. Your server then has to send the content physically from its location to that of your audience. If the distance between your audience and server is large, it will take longer for the data to travel from one place to the other. However, if you know where most of your target audience is located, you might want to choose a Linux shared hosting server that is located nearby.
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Content Delivery Network to the Rescue
The best way to ensure your website is extremely fast is as simple as using a content delivery network. CDN is a set of servers that are located at strategic locations all around the world. Each of these servers will have a mirrored copy of your entire website. So when a visitor requests access to your website, the server located nearest to them sends the information, which reduces the distance it has to travel and the time it takes as well.
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Compress data transfer
Gzip data compression is the perfect way to increase your shared hosting speed. After the server receives your request, it will compress the data while sending it to you, which is then decompressed once it reaches your device. Since the compression results in the files reducing in size, the data transfer takes less amount of time.
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Optimize images
One of the biggest culprits that lead to slow loading time is images. High-resolution images can be very large and take a longer time to travel from the server to the audience. If your image is approximately 3000 pixels wide, you can optimize it by using code that shrinks the image to 150 pixels wide. The larger image will be downloaded by the browser while reducing it to be accommodated within the code.
One way you can decrease the amount of time it takes devices to download the images on your website, is it measure their sizes manually before uploading them on your website. In case the speed of your website will benefit from a 150-pixel wide image, then you should choose images that are of similar sizes to upload. Instead of TIFF and BMP, you should save images in PNG and JPEG format as they take up less amount of space. It makes a huge difference if you optimize images on your website.
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Employ lazy loading
Lazy loading is an efficient way of image optimization that staggers image loading leading to the vital pieces of content that are visible on the screen loading first. Those that are not immediately visible are loaded after the important content is loaded first, and the visitor begins scrolling down. Lazy loading can be installed as a plugin if it is not a part of your primary theme.
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Compress your website
It is not just the amount of content your website includes, it’s how heavy it is too. It is similar to moving the contents of your house. It’s not just the number of boxes that matters, it is also how heavy they are that take up more space and slow down the transfer. The best part is that several tools like Gzip help compress your entire website along with its contents. The contents of your website that weigh the most include CSS, HTML, Javascript, and your images. Compressing those helps reduce the amount of time it takes to send them to your users.
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Use caching
Websites are formed using a variety of static and active elements. The elements that remain the same are referred to as static, while the ones that are prone to change are called dynamic. Caching includes saving copies of static files that do not actively need your server to operate from scratch every time a similar request is made, it helps loading time becomes faster. Several control panels have a web caching option that you can just switch on. If this option is not available to you, several plugins can help you accomplish the same.
Conclusion
At a time when the market is filled with websites competing to capture as many audiences as possible, you need to do everything in your power to ensure your target audience finds your website to be the best among the rest. While content is the main element that will attract your audience to your website, speed is the factor that will help them stay. If your website is slow it will lead to a disappointing user experience and a spike in bounce rates. The measures described above will allow your website to load faster and increase your customer base along with boosting your revenue.
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