In this article we will explore some of the simple website optimisation techniques you can implement in order to improve your website’s performance.
The first key web optimisation tip is to ensure that you are using a correctly implemented cache. This will create versions of your pages that load much quicker for visitors to your website. Effectively, your web server will remember what it served last time it received the same request and serve the same again rather than having to go through the full process. This helps to save your server’s resources.
This is similar to the web caching discussed above, except in this case it is requests to your database that are cached. Tools such as Memcache and Redis can be deployed to improve your website’s performance in this regard. The database is often the prime suspect when a website is running slowly or performing poorly, so optimising it often provides a quick win.
Using New Relic or a similar piece of software will provide analysis on your website’s performance. It will show application and database query performance, which will allow you to identify pinch points and problem areas for your website.
Using a content delivery network (CDN) takes static objects away from your server and hosts them separately. This frees up your server’s resources to deliver everything else more speedily.
Other options to optimise your website include using gzipping or minifying tools. Gzipping involves compressing the files hosted on your server to make them as small as possible, which in turn makes them load more quickly.
Minifying effectively combs your website’s code to pull out anything that is superfluous to getting all the components of the page to load effectively. This has the effect of allowing the code, and therefore the website, to serve quicker.
Beyond that, further optimisation of your website is likely to involve an overhaul of your hosting infrastructure or at least adding a bit more horsepower. Click here for further reading on that.
