As the internet as grown and evolved over the years, so too have the options available for website owners when it comes to web hosting. Whether you’re launching a new website or looking to switch hosting providers, it’s important to understand the different types of web hosting available and their pros and cons. In this article, I will provide a comprehensive overview of web hosting, the different types of hosting available, and the pros and cons of each.

Introduction to Web Hosting

At its most basic level, web hosting is the service that allows you to make your website accessible via the internet. Think of it as renting space on a server where your website files are stored and served to visitors. When someone types your website URL into their browser, the server sends your website files to their device, allowing them to view your website.

Web hosting providers offer a range of services to make this possible, from shared hosting to dedicated server hosting. Each type of hosting has its own unique features and benefits, as well as drawbacks. Understanding the differences between the various types of hosting is critical to choosing the right solution for your needs.

Types of Web Hosting

There are three main types of web hosting: shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated server hosting. Let’s take a closer look at each of these options and what they offer.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the most common type of web hosting and is best suited for small to medium-sized websites that don’t require a lot of resources. With shared hosting, your website is stored on a server along with many other websites. This means that your website shares server resources, such as CPU, RAM, and disk space, with other sites on the same server.

Pros of shared hosting include its affordability and ease of use, making it a great choice for beginners. Shared hosting plans typically come with a user-friendly control panel that allows you to manage your website and server settings. Additionally, most web hosting providers offer 24/7 support to help you with any issues that may arise.

However, shared hosting also has its drawbacks. Since you’re sharing server resources with other websites, your website’s performance may be affected by other sites on the same server. Additionally, shared hosting plans typically have limited resources, which can lead to slow loading times and downtime during periods of high traffic.

VPS Hosting

VPS hosting, or virtual private server hosting, is a step up from shared hosting. With VPS hosting, your website is still stored on a shared server, but you’re given a guaranteed amount of resources, such as CPU, RAM, and disk space. This means that your website is less likely to be affected by other sites on the same server.

Pros of VPS hosting include its increased performance and scalability. Since you have dedicated resources, your website is able to handle higher levels of traffic without slowing down. Additionally, VPS hosting plans typically come with more advanced features and customization options than shared hosting plans.

However, VPS hosting is also more expensive than shared hosting and may require more technical expertise to set up and manage. Additionally, since you’re still sharing a server with other websites, your website’s performance may still be affected by other sites on the same server.

Dedicated Server Hosting

Dedicated server hosting is the most powerful and customizable type of web hosting. With dedicated server hosting, you’re renting an entire physical server for your website. This means that you have complete control over the server’s resources and can customize it to meet your exact needs.

Pros of dedicated server hosting include its unmatched performance and flexibility. Since you have dedicated resources, your website can handle even the highest levels of traffic without slowing down. Additionally, you have complete control over the server’s software and hardware, allowing you to customize it to meet your exact needs.

However, dedicated server hosting is also the most expensive type of web hosting and requires a high level of technical expertise to set up and manage. Additionally, since you’re responsible for the entire server, any issues or downtime must be addressed by you or your team.

Choosing the Right Type of Hosting for Your Website

When it comes to choosing the right type of hosting for your website, there are a few key factors to consider. These include:

• Your website’s size and traffic levels
• Your budget
• Your technical expertise
• Your need for customization and control

If you’re launching a small website with low traffic levels, shared hosting may be the most affordable and user-friendly option. However, if you’re expecting high traffic levels or need more advanced features, VPS hosting or dedicated server hosting may be a better choice.

Ultimately, the right type of hosting for your website will depend on your unique needs and goals. It’s important to do your research and choose a reputable hosting provider that can meet your needs and provide the support you need to succeed.

Conclusion

Web hosting is a critical component of launching and running a website. By understanding the different types of hosting available and their pros and cons, you can choose the right solution for your needs and ensure that your website is accessible and performing at its best.

Whether you choose shared hosting, VPS hosting, or dedicated server hosting, it’s important to choose a reputable hosting provider that can provide the support and resources you need to succeed. With the right hosting solution in place, you can focus on growing your website and achieving your goals.

If you’re considering, say, launching a website, there are several basic web hosting aspects that you should be familiar with before starting the project. Although it’s relatively easy to sign up and use a provider’s supplied website-building software to swiftly create an attractive, functional front end, there are a lot of related terms and concepts to wrap your head around. As you’ll soon see, some of it is confusing, if not outright contradictory. Here’s what you need to know about web hosting before opening an account.

1. There’s a Big Difference Between Hosting Types

If you’ve spent any amount of time on a web host’s website, you’ve probably seen terms like shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud, WordPress, and reseller. They represent the different web hosting types, but not every web host offers them all. Plus, the hosting types differ from one another in significant ways.

Nearly every web host offers shared hosting, the cheapest form of web hosting. With shared hosting, your website shares a server and server resources with many other sites. If you want to keep your web hosting budget small, and don’t expect much traffic, shared hosting is the way to go. You should expect to pay less than $10 per month for this web hosting type. This level of hosting is really best suited for small sites that don’t need a huge amount of bandwidth, however. Since you’re sharing resources with other sites, you should be prepared for the occasional slowdown should one of your site-mates start attracting a lot of visitors. Free web hosting is available if you’re on a tight budget, which generally comes with its own caveats (typically ads and extremely low server specs). However, you can find Free hosting within The Core Hosting without limitations on the server specs.

Larger businesses that expect big traffic to their sites should pick VPS or dedicated hosting, each of which offers increasingly powerful server specs. VPS hosting is like a high-powered version of shared hosting, except that far fewer websites share a server’s resources, which are also a bit more segregated. VPS hosting costs more than shared hosting, but you should pay less than $100 per month.

Dedicated hosting places your site on a server all by itself, so it can leverage a server’s full power. This is the most expensive type of hosting; you may end up paying $100 per month or more for this raw power.

Reseller hosting lets you start your own branded web hosting business without worrying about building the infrastructure from scratch. WordPress hosting lets you build a site in an environment that caters to the world’s most popular content management system. And cloud hosting? That’s an entirely different beast that lets you easily scale website power across multiple servers, though not every web host offers it. Yet. The pricing for these hosting tiers are all over the place, so shopping around is vital.

2. Bandwidth Isn’t the Same as Data Transfer

“Bandwidth” and “data transfer” are frequently used interchangeably to define the amount of data that your website serves to visitors, but the terms, technically, do not have the same definitions.

Bandwidth represents the total amount of data that can be transferred at one time, while data transfer is the throughput or the actual amount of information that can be used over a given period of time—typically a month. Think of it like this: a web host may have a maximum 5GB bandwidth, but depending on your hosting plan, your site may only allow 1GB of data transfers per month.

Note: If your website exceeds its allotted monthly data transfers due to a Reddit hit, for instance, a web host may slow your site’s data transfer speeds or charge you a fee as a penalty. It may even prompt you to upgrade to a higher web hosting tier. It’s good to know your site’s data limitations before you run into situations like this.

3. Unlimited Isn’t Quite Unlimited

Web hosts will entice you to sign up for their web hosting plans by tempting you with the promise of unlimited storage or monthly data transfers. It’s generally not a completely honest deal. Now, I won’t say that these web hosts are straight up lying, but the “unlimited” storage or data transfers boasts nearly always have limitations that vary by company. FatCow, for example, offers “oodles” of disk space, and states that there’s no cap on a user’s content—as long as that person remains fully compliant with the company’s terms of service and utilizes storage “for the normal operation of your FatCow website.” It’s just like the bottomless shrimp buffet: Eventually a restaurant will cut you off, if they don’t simply run out of shrimp first.

Unlimited storage and data transfers are typically associated with shared or WordPress plans, and they let you run wild…within limits. If your blog gets a steady stream of reasonable traffic (whatever that may mean!), you’ll be in good standing. However, you shouldn’t expect to upload or stream 50TB of data per day. The average joe isn’t doing that is likely dabbling in some questionable activities.

You should consult a web host’s terms of service, or a customer service representative, to learn exactly what you can and cannot do within the scope of your plan’s unlimited offering. For example, here at The Core Hosting, We offer completely unmetered Data Transfer, Or otherwise known as “Bandwidth” for all of our services.

4. The Hard Disk Drive/Solid-State Drive Tradeoff

If you’re looking to sign up for shared web hosting, you’ll likely receive real estate on traditional hard disk Drive (HDD) server. The advantage of an HDD-based server is that it can offer large storage amounts on the cheap. As you move up the hosting ladder to more powerful offerings, such as VPS and dedicated, web hosts will give you the option to build a site on a solid-state drive (SSD).

SSD-based servers are lightning-fast storage units. SSD technology is still pretty pricey, so your SSD-based servers typically carry much smaller storage totals than HDDs. You’ll rarely see 1TB SSD servers, which is a number that’s commonplace in the HDD arena.

The SSD vs. HDD discussion is a lengthy one that goes well beyond the scope of this article. I recommend reading Tom Brant’s excellent SSD vs HDD: What’s the Difference?

5. A Linux Server Will Do…Most of the Time

Nearly every web host offers Linux as the operating system that powers their servers. In fact, I don’t think I’ve reviewed a web host that lacked the free, open-source OS. Even if you aren’t familiar with Linux, you don’t need to do any special work on the back end to build a website. Website builders make building sites a breeze.

That said, if your site needs the ASP or ASP.NET scripting frameworks, you’ll need to run with the Windows Server operating system. That’s because the script your write and webpages your produce will only function in a Windows-based environment.

There’s an additional benefit: Microsoft apps, such as Office or Outlook, integrate with the server with ease. The downside? Windows servers are incompatible with Linux-based, open-source software unless you do some tinkering. In addition, Windows servers cost approximately $10 to $20 more than their Linux equivalents, but if you need Microsoft’s tools it’s a small premium. Linux vs. Windows: How to Pick the Best Server OS for Your Website breaks down everything you need to know about these operating systems.

WordPress 6.0 closes the conceptual stage of the Gutenberg project Phase 2, bringing with it many enhancements to the full site editing, blocks, and global styles features.

This article will provide an overview of what to expect from WordPress’s next major release.

WordPress 6.0 Release Schedule

WordPress 6.0 is scheduled for release on May 24, 2022. The first beta release is expected on April 12, 2022, and you can Test it to explore the new planned features and report any bugs to the developers.

WordPress will launch several beta versions and release candidates before the final release. Here is the WordPress 6.0 timeline provided by the WordPress team:

Planned Features for WordPress 6.0

The previous major release has provided the foundation for full site editing with the Gutenberg editor and pattern library. We can expect considerable refinement of these features and new additions to create an even better site-building experience.

Now, let’s go through some of the highlighted features planned for WordPress 6.0. Note that this is not a definitive list, as the developers may change it as we approach the release date.

Site Editor

The site editor, launched in the previous major release, was a big step forward in page and post customization.

WordPress 6.0 will improve the editor by introducing new features and removing some limitations. Here are some expected site editor improvements in WordPress 6.0:

• Global style switcher. Users will be able to quickly switch between pre-made global style alternatives. This means you can implement a new global style without modifying the current one via the global style interface.
• Selecting text across multiple blocks. This new writing improvement lets you select text from multiple paragraph and heading blocks. If you try to do this in the current version, it will automatically select the entire block.

• Block style retaining. When you transform a block into a different block, this new feature will keep the block style, including color and typography. For example, the text color in a heading block will stay the same if you switch it to a heading block. This style retaining feature also applies to the button block when you add more buttons to the content.
• More template options. WordPress 6.0 will offer more options for template creation, such as author, category, and taxonomy.
• Decoupling themes from templates. Switching themes will not change any customized templates.

Browse mode and site navigation structurefor the site editor are expected to arrive in WordPress 6.0.

However, according to the WordPress 6.0 product walkthrough, these features are not ready yet.

Other than these major improvements, the new WordPress version will also provide UI improvements for the site editor, such as selectable blocks on the list view, the addition of a code editor and preferences for the main site editor, and better placeholders for various blocks.

Blocks

WordPress blocks will be significantly enhanced in WordPress 6.0, including the introduction of several new blocks. Here are some of the notable improvements to expect in the new release:

• New blocks. WordPress 6.0 will add post author biography and read more blocks. There’s also a plan to add 12 blocks for post comments, including comment form and comment loop blocks.
• Block style preview. Hovering over the block style options in the design tool will show a live preview in the content area.
• Block locking UI. WordPress 5.9 added the lock attribute, but users still need to tweak the code to lock a block. WordPress 6.0 will add a UI in the block toolbar to make locking a block easier.
• Featured image expansion. Featured images will no longer be limited to post featured image blocks. It will be possible to incorporate them into media and text blocks or cover blocks. This enhancement will improve the overall design possibilities.
• More transformation options. WordPress 6.0 will add six new block transformation options, including paragraph to code, group to row, and tag cloud to categories.
• Nested quote block. It will be possible to nest blocks and add paragraphs, lists, or code snippets inside the quote.

Patterns

Block patterns will be at the center of the site creation process in WordPress 6.0. WordPress has already kickstarted this by launching the pattern directory and pattern creator on the official website.

The main change planned is the replacement of the quick block inserter. If you click the plus icon in the content area of the site editor, the inserter will show pattern options instead of block options.

Another proposal is to use patterns for layout transformation. As of now, patterns are only used for creating new content. This proposal suggests that patterns should be able to transform the content layout without losing the existing content.

Design Tools

WordPress 6.0 aims to improve user experience, introduce more customization options, and expand API support in the design tools. There are also many smaller improvements, like a better color palette interface and border control.

Here are some of the significant improvements for the design tools in WordPress 6.0:

• Layout transformation for multiple blocks. WordPress 6.0 will add new options in the block toolbar and the design tool panel to transform multiple blocks. Users can select several blocks and use this feature to transform them into container blocks like group, row, and stack blocks.
• Custom post date format. The design tool for post date block will provide the option to use a custom date format.
• Gallery block gap spacing. The gallery block will have a block gap spacing configuration in the block design tool. This will allow users to better customize the layout of image galleries.
• Web Fonts API. The Webfonts API integration was excluded from the WordPress 5.9 release and will be re-introduced in WordPress 6.0. Users and theme developers will be able to add web fonts options to the global styles interface.
• Typography support for container blocks. Group, row, and stack blocks will have typography options.

Conclusion

WordPress 6.0 will bring significant improvements to the full site editing experience. We can expect more flexibility in the site editor and more customization possibilities thanks to the enhancement of the blocks and design tools.

WordPress developers will release the first beta version of WordPress 6.0 on April 12, 2022. You can Test it in a staging or testing environment to experience the features this major release will provide.

Apache Log4j 2, a Java-based logging library developed by the Apache Foundation, is used by numerous enterprise-class applications and cloud services to provide advanced logging capabilities. Depending on if you currently utilize a Managed, or UnManaged service, you may be vulnerable to this newly found Zero day Exploit. For customers who enjoy the benefits of a Managed service, such as our Managed VPS, Managed Dedicated Hosting, or Shared hosting users, you have nothing to worry about, as our services where patched the moment it was available. For anyone Self-managing their services, now is the time to update if you have not already.

On November 24, 2021, Alibaba Cloud’s security team reported a Log4j 2 remote code execution vulnerability to Apache. The exploit takes advantage of some Log4j functions that perform recursive analysis. Which, with specially constructed malicious requests, attackers can trigger remote code execution.

The vulnerability impacts default configurations of several Apache frameworks, including:

• Apache Druid
• Apache Flink
• Apache Solr
• Apache Struts2

In Apache Log4j2 versions up to and including 2.14.1 (excluding security releases 2.3.1, 2.12.2 and 2.12.3), the JNDI features used in configurations, log messages, and parameters do not protect against attacker-controlled LDAP and other JNDI related endpoints. An attacker who can control log messages or log message parameters can execute arbitrary code loaded from LDAP servers when message lookup substitution is enabled. ^Source

On December 10, 2021, this vulnerability was officially designated in the NIST national vulnerability database as CVE-2021-44228 (also known as the “Log4Shell” vulnerability). This then expanded to several other found, and later patched, vulnerabilities listed as CVE-2021-45046 and CVE-2021-45105.

It was found that the fix to address CVE-2021-44228 in Apache Log4j 2.15.0 was incomplete in certain non-default configurations. When the logging configuration uses a non-default Pattern Layout with a Context Lookup (for example, $${ctx:loginId}), attackers with control over Thread Context Map (MDC) input data can craft malicious input data using a JNDI Lookup pattern, resulting in an information leak and remote code execution in some environments and local code execution in all environments; remote code execution has been demonstrated on macOS but no other tested environments.

CVE-2021-45046

Apache Log4j2 versions 2.0-alpha1 through 2.16.0, excluding 2.12.3, did not protect from uncontrolled recursion from self-referential lookups. When the logging configuration uses a non-default Pattern Layout with a Context Lookup (for example, $${ctx:loginId}), attackers with control over Thread Context Map (MDC) input data can craft malicious input data that contains a recursive lookup, resulting in a StackOverflowError that will terminate the process. This is also known as a DOS (Denial of Service) attack.

CVE-2021-45105

How the Vulnerability Impacts You

Depending on the type of hosting account you have with The Core Hosting , you may or may not need to take action:

Shared, Reseller, and Managed WordPress Accounts

If you have a shared, reseller, or Managed WordPress hosting account, you do not need to do anything. These servers automatically receive frequent updates that include patches for the Log4j 2 vulnerability.

cPanel published an update to mitigate CVE-2021-44228 the same day the vulnerability was announced. For more information, see cPanel’s blog entry.

Managed VPS and Dedicated Servers

If you have a Managed VPS or Managed Dedicated server, you most likely do not need to take any action – your server is updated automatically with patches for the Log4j 2 vulnerability. The only exception is if you have installed any software utilizing log4j outside of cPanel/WHM you should ensure those installations are updated. All software installed and managed by The Core Hosting has already been updated.

cPanel published an update to mitigate CVE-2021-44228(And the subsequent follow-up patches) the same day the vulnerability was announced. For more information, see cPanel’s blog entry.

Unmanaged VPS and Dedicated Servers

If you have an unmanaged VPS or unmanaged Dedicated server, make sure you keep it up-to-date with the latest security patches. If you need assistance with this, our amazing team of support staff is ready to help! We know that this kind of exploit can be dangerous and sometimes hard to correct. So let us assist.

If you use Log4j 2 it is very important to ensure you have updated to the most recent version. The first patch included another vulnerability which required a second patch.

Java 8 (or later) users should upgrade to release 2.17.0 or higher.

Java 7 users should upgrade to release 2.12.3 or higher.

Java 6 users should upgrade to release 2.3.1 or higher

More information can be found at Apache.

For information about how to install updates on unmanaged servers, please see this Knowledge Base article.

The Bottom Line

Heartbleed, Shellshock; The Log4j vulnerability is only the latest in a long line of security bugs. It isn’t the first, and it surely won’t be the last.

If you have a managed hosting account, you can rest assured that we take care of server configuration and updates for you. If you have an unmanaged server however, we highly recommend that your team upgrade as soon as possible, or reach out to our support for help regarding this Zero day exploit.

SEO Optimization There is no better way to increase organic traffic to your website than by developing high-quality content. High-quality content created for your intended users increases page traffic and improves the authority and relevance of your pages. In fact, the only way to better position search engines is to develop more and more content that incorporates large-volume keywords, as well as ensuring it is SEO Optimized.

Great Content

In our opinion, one of the best ways to get started is to create a constant stream of content and a content strategy as part of content marketing. As mentioned earlier, bringing fresh, updated and relevant content brings people to your site and gives them a reason to stay on your side for a while. Create blog content that educates your audience about your products and share links to that content via email is a great way to increase traffic to your website.

If you have a large group of loyal readers, you will get a lot of traffic to your website every day. Not only will a guest post on a popular website have a high ranking for the long-tail keywords you target and send you constant traffic, but it will also send you a lot of instant referral traffic from that site. You can also create content for your own website and reach out to homebuyers and blog owners to ask for links.

Social Media

Use Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to promote blog posts and other helpful pages on your site. This allows you to turn your social media followers into website visitors and attract traffic from their networks when posting shareable content. Another way to increase traffic to your website is to be listed on free online directories and rating sites.

The more eyes you have on your links, the more free traffic you get to your website. By adding hashtags and posts to your websites and blog posts you can expand your reach beyond your network and discover users searching for your products and services. Post content tools right out of Tor and offer them in exchange for user contact data, and you will maximize your returns and find new leads.

Use your Professional Groups

Another way to increase website traffic is by promoting content and tools in relevant LinkedIn groups and forums where people from your industry interact. You can also place ads on social media platforms, where you can free-of-charge share your high-quality content to the organic follower base that you have built. The best way to increase site traffic on Facebook is to build a Facebook community for your niche and curate relevant content for your blog.

There are many SEO tactics that you can do on your websites to increase its ranking in search engines and get more visitors. GTmetrix analyzes the speed of your websites and other technical features to influence the user experience and ranking in search results. Online marketers can also use SimilarWeb to analyze web traffic statistics for other websites.

Optimizing your content for search engines is a valuable and rewarding practice. This includes creating high-quality content that your audience is looking for, and writing concise meta-descriptions for your websites. Optimizing sites for SEO doesn’t take long and can help boost your organic traffic.

Advertising, paid search, social media and advertising are some of the most efficient ways to increase website traffic. Each option has its advantages and disadvantages – for example, users can block ads and the average cost per click on Google ads and search networks is $1 to $2 per click – so it is important to set a budget and target to invest a ton of money in advertising, whether it is paid search, social media or advertisements. This increase traffic to your website and increases your profile in your industry, particularly if you have a moderate to large following. 

Christina Perricone, HubSpot Pillar Page Content team manager, says that the Pillar Topic Cluster model organizes content on your site around a single topic, search terms and internal shortcuts. To see who the experts are, you can create column pages and long blog posts that cover all aspects of the topic. You can also write cluster content to support blog posts that target long-tail keywords and show that you cover the topic well.

Content, Content, Content

In addition, websites that publish more than 16 articles a month receive 35 times more traffic than websites that publish zero to four articles. A blog post that ranks among low-volume, competitive keywords and long-tail keywords generates more search traffic than a competitive keyword that ranks in the top three. With an e-mail referral program you can tap the collective advertising power of your audience to increase newsletter subscribers and website traffic. Utilizing a Shared host or Managed WordPress provide as a location for your website and related content is a perfect way to help grow your content.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is without question one of the best ways to achieve consistent, long-term results. Identifying opportunities at an early stage and building on them with keyword strategies and iterations can help to increase search traffic and brand visibility. You can check individual page improvements with our Page SEO Checker to redirect traffic from low conversion pages to relevant high conversion pages.

If you rank high on Google, you can generate passive organic traffic to your website. Content Explorer gives you a list of relevant sites that receive a lot of organic traffic despite fewer backlinks. Browse the pages and search for topics and company values that make sense and are covered. 

Use Medium to create intelligent content marketing posts that link to your primary posts on your website or blog. Medium is one of my go-to platforms for promoting my content and provides authority for websites and domains giving you the flexibility to link and store a blog entry with a CMS like WordPress. Publish unique, high-quality posts on LinkedIn: This is another platform that offers tremendous added value by ensuring that you link to these posts, anchor content on your blog or website, and gain important authority by bridging your primary post.

Page URLs, titles, headlines and content have a major influence on search engine rankings. When designing your website, pages should contain spaces for headings and tags that include metadata information about the content of your page. For example, you don’t want the word “engineering” to appear three or more times in a URL, or for the term “Northern Lights” to be repeated in a page title or headline.

VPS Hosting

VPS Hosting As the name implies, renting means that you share a server of one provider with many other websites. You share your server resources with other websites, which means that if a site has a problem it can spill onto your site and a good shared host will try to mitigate this. Some hosting providers offer shared plans, and they are often the cheapest option available.

If your hosting environment is virtualized, you will be isolated from other websites by being on the same physical server. Virtualization technology has a high level of security so that servers from other websites cannot affect the virtualized host in any way. If your host environment is virtualized, it is completely isolated from the other sites on the server.

VPS hosting is cheaper than dedicated web hosting because multiple users contribute to the cost of a single server. VPS is similar to shared hosting but instead of your site sharing a server with other sites, some sites share space and resources on a server that has been divided into various virtualized server environments. Just like Share Hosting, VPS provides a baseline of resources, but you are guaranteed to have additional resources if your website experiences an increase in traffic.

VPS hosting is a happy medium in terms of flexibility, security, reliability and scalability. VPS (Virtual Private Server) is compared to shared hosting in almost every respect, especially when it comes to technology. A VPS is a server in a shared environment where much more than one user runs on the same physical machine, and the technology that allocates resources and keeps users separate is more mature.

VPS servers can be used on the same machine for multiple websites or for joint hosting with some websites. In a VPS plan, the physical server is split into several virtual servers to store files and web pages. This means that multiple websites located on the server do not have to share resources.

The most obvious limitation is the sharing of computing power, memory, disk space, and other resources on a server. With this collective sharing, one site on a shared server can gobble up resources and slow down other sites on the server. Dedicated hosting is when a physical server has dedicated resources for a single user and website.

The difference between the two hosting types is the server type on which your website is stored. Shared VPS Hosting is a dedicated server that stores content and files from your websites on a separate server.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting gives you your own partitioned resources, but they are distributed across many different servers in the cloud. A VPS hosting partition is like owning a penthouse condominium (or many apartments) – it’s a building where you have everything you need but don’t have to share what you need. It gives more space to grow and less constraints than a digital condominium because more space is needed when you host your site or application on a virtual server assigned to you.

Shared hosting is the cheapest form of hosting if you are a website owner who needs the extra resources that VPS Hosting provides. It is the perfect form of host for newcomers and site owners as it is simple to get started and provides sufficient server resources for the initial phase of your site growth. At functional level, VPS Hosting offers your website a high level of performance, scalability and security. 

VPS hosting is excellent in offering reliability, speed and customization when selecting a hosting package for a large website. It allows you to customize and configure applications and software to improve the performance of your websites, provide root access and allow you to customize the backend to your needs. Whether you are an experienced website developer or a local start-up, this is something to consider.

Shared hosting can be a good option for short-term plans for small online sites, but you will have more problems with overall performance if your site comes to large traffic levels.

Shared servers offer customers bandwidth, management, flexibility and performance, while the host handles technical configuration, maintenance and security. Shared VPS hosting is coupled with other common options such as dedicated hosting and cloud hosting. Shared hosting tends to be cheaper because the provider can serve many customers on one computer.

VPS hosting offers more resources and tends to be more reliable, but costs more. If you are using a reputable host that does a good job managing shared server resources such as HostGator, the difference between a shared hosting plan and a low-traffic VPS may not be obvious. For VPS hosting as the cost of shared hosting is shared between many users and shared servers, you can expect to pay more than for shared hosting.

If you have a website that requires medium to high traffic and a lot of CPU and memory, such as a WordPress site with database-intensive plugins and other features, you might notice a difference between a shared hosting account and a VPS with low traffic on the backend of your website. This does not mean that your site will be below this traffic level but if you have complex WordPress themes or many images on your website, there could be enough traffic to reduce page loading times if you compete with other peoples server resources. In general, sites with VPS are faster than those with shared hosting, which can lead to better conversions.

VPS is a better option if you expect your website to get more traffic and can afford to pay a little more. You don’t have to share resources with many other websites. 

And speed sells!

We created the following six-chapter in-depth speed optimization guide to show you how important it is to have a fast loading, snappy website! Countless research papers and benchmarks prove that optimizing your sites’ speed is one of the most affordable and highest ROI providing investments!

In the following guide, we’ll try to explain the technical details while at the same time provide you with easy to follow instructions that you can start implementing right away! We hope you’ll find it valuable and perhaps share-worthy! ?

Lightning-fast page load speed amplifies visitor engagement, retention, and boosts sales. Instantaneous website response leads to higher conversion rates, and every 1 second delay in page load decreases customer satisfaction by 16 percent, page views by 11 percent and conversion rates by 7 percent according to a recent Aberdeen Group research.

Highlighting the Key Aspects of Website Speed Optimization:

• Chapter 1 – Introduction to Website Speed Optimization
• Chapter 2 – Website Performance Impacts Business Success
• Chapter 3 – Speed Optimized Mobile Website Overshadows Desktop
• Chapter 4 – Common Business Mistakes that Kill Website Performance
• Chapter 5 – Website Speed Testing – Identify Performance Bottlenecks!
• Chapter 6 – How to Improve Website Speed?

Chapter 1: Introduction to Website Speed Optimization

What Exactly is Page Speed?

The term page speed essentially refers to the length of time at which web pages or media content is downloaded from website hosting servers and displayed onto the requesting web browser. Page load time is the duration between clicking the link and displaying the entire content from the web page on the requesting browser.

Page load time

There are three core aspects necessary to understand page speed in the context of user experience and website performance:

• The view of time taken in delivering the requested material along with the accompanying HTML content to the browser.
• Browser response to page load requests.
• The view of end-users as the requested web page renders on the browser – this is the ultimate empirical measure of page load speed.

Website performance subsequently impacts rankings in search engines developed under proprietary and undisclosed algorithms, incorporating key factors including page speed, user experience, website responsiveness, and a whole lot of other website performance metrics.

The absolute critical principle in maximizing website performance is to focus on page speed optimization from the ground up. Performance optimization plugins, server-side scripts, and final tweaks have minimal – however noticeable – impact on page speed and load times. Yet, Web developers and online business owners tend to overlook page load times in their website development and design strategies.

Slow? How Slow?

Anything slower than the blink of an eye – 400 milliseconds. Engineers at Google have discovered that the barely perceptible page load time 0.4 seconds is long enough to cause users to search less.
Technology has come a long way in improving the internet experience. The over-crowded cyberworld of the 1990s was often labeled as the World Wide Wait, but innovations in communication and networking technologies have revolutionized the way digital information is transmitted across the internet. The next generation of online businesses have all the resources they need to deliver content instantaneously, but to leverage and complement these resources, businesses need speed-optimized websites that deliver the best user experience.

Microsoft speed specialist and computer scientist Harry Shum believes 0.25 seconds of difference in page load time – faster or slower – is the magic number dictating competitive advantages for online businesses.

And what happens when they don’t?

1 in 4 visitors would abandon the website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. 46 percent of users don’t revisit poorly performing websites. Website owners have a mere 5 seconds to engage visitors before they consider leaving. 74 percent of users accessing the mobile site would leave if it takes longer than 5 seconds to load. Every one-second delay in page load time could lead to $1.6 billion in annual losses for online merchants as big as Amazon.

Slow

47 percent of eCommerce customers expect page load times of less than two seconds before they consider leaving – 40 percent of users would abandon the site at the third second of waiting before a performance analytics tool even captures their presence on the site. The average peak load time for conversions is mere 2 seconds – faster than millions of websites out there.

And what happens when they speed up?

When Mozilla increased page speed by 2.2 seconds, Firefox download figures rose by 15.4 percent or 10 million per year! Walmart saw a 2 percent increase in conversion rates for every 1-second improvement in page load times. The numbers don’t lie!

Speed increase

Acceptable Website Performance – The Neuroscience and Rhythm

100 milliseconds. That’s how long the Occipital lobe in our brain stores visual information as a Sensory memory.

Google researchers suggest page load times of less than 100 milliseconds give visitors the illusion of instantaneous website response as the visual Sensory memory processor in our brain works in bursts of 100 milliseconds. The memory store clears itself after 0.1 seconds as photoreceptor cells in the eyes transmit more information to the Occipital lobe.

Acceptable website performance

1 second of page load time does suffice in maintaining a seamless flow of thought – users feel in control of their Web browsing activities, and the mental stress is not aggravated unless the website fails to respond as desired.

At 10 seconds of delay, visitor attention is barely kept. The sensation of impatience, frustration, and feeling of abandonment is usually strong enough to keep visitors from revisiting such slow websites again.

The Pragmatic Psychological Conundrum

However, abandoning a website due to slow page speed is not always the quickest path to access the desired information on the web. An average user would spend several extra minutes browsing fast-responding but irrelevant websites, instead of waiting a few more seconds for sluggish relevant websites to respond. Struggling with downtime and WordPress problems? The Core Hosting is the hosting solution designed to save you time! Check out our features

And considering the sea of resources on the web, users eventually find the required information on some website or the other. But the eventual losers are online businesses unable to reach their online customers fast enough, despite hosting the exact information and services being sought.

Strange enough, visitors would rather spend excessive time browsing for the information elsewhere than waiting a few seconds for the right website to load. The experience is similar to the Houston airport incident from a few years back that led to a clever solution.

Play with human psychology

Passengers at the airport had to take a 1-minute walk to the baggage claim and waited there for 7 minutes to receive their bags. The customer relations center was ultimately inundated with complaints about the slow service.

So the airport executives came up with a cunning solution to “resolve’ the issue. They moved the arrival gates far away and routed the luggage to the outermost carousel.

Passengers now had to take a 6-minute walk to the baggage claim area where they received their luggage within 2 minutes. The result? Zero complaints. Absolutely no passenger left unsatisfied – except with some tired legs.

Similarly, elevators contain mirrors so the passengers keep busy in styling themselves and not thinking about the time spent traveling. This passenger behavior is analogous to that of website visitors in the cyber world. And the same general principle applies for online businesses as well: It is the objective length of wait that defines the experience of waiting.

Now, online businesses can play with human psychology like the Houston airport executives and speed up evolution, but with virtually no specific formula to make website response times bearable for every individual visitor out there. Or they can actually reduce the objective length of wait in delivering the requested content to their online visitors with a fast responding website – whichever is possible when the website is designed to deliver instantaneous response and high quality, seamless user experience.

This guide will focus on the latter practice, and will actually help you maximize the potential of your online business by optimizing website performance and thereby enhancing customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty.

Core Components of the guide include:

• Chapter 2: Website Performance Impacts Business Success.
• Chapter 3: Speed Optimized Mobile Website Overshadows Desktop Internet Success.
• Chapter 4: Common Business Mistakes that Kill Website Performance.
• Chapter 5: Website Speed Testing – Identify Performance Bottlenecks!
• Chapter 6: How to Improve Website Speed?

Chapter 2: Website Performance Impacts Business Success

Performance Impacts Sales

Website performance is user experience – the power of page speed, translating into an attractive online shopping experience inspires sales figures and eventually determines online business success. The industry kingpin Google began factoring page speed into its proprietary search algorithms ever since it experienced the compelling repercussions of website performance lapses impacting sales. The search engine giant once experienced a 20 percent slump in traffic resulting from half a second delay in page load times.

While Google was quick to resolve the issue that barely crippled its market share, the same is not always the case with online businesses yet to establish their presence in the competitive online marketplace.

Q: So how does website performance affects sales for an average online business?

A: Dramatically, is the only answer!

Forrester consulting firm recently studied the state of consumer online shopping expectations and evaluated how underperforming websites kill business bottom line whereas high-level website performance rapidly boosts sales.

The research finds 88 percent of internet users choose online retailers delivering a high-performance and user-friendly website experience, and almost 50 percent abandon websites that fail to load within 3 seconds.

These actions consequently impact sales. 79 percent of dissatisfied customers no longer revisit underperforming websites – except when you’re Google or Amazon. 46 percent of dissatisfied customers develop a lasting negative impression and 44 percent share their shopping experiences with the rest of the world. The implications go well beyond the cyber world as 87 percent of customers shop in online as well as brick-and-mortar retail stores.

Abandon slow websites

While service and product quality apparently has the biggest impact on business sales, converting website visitors into purchasing customers in the cyber world largely depends on developing a positive customer impression. And this is where ecommerce website performance parameters such as ultra-fast page speed and rapid check-out processes come into play, ultimately giving customers a positive psychological impression encouraging sales and customer loyalty.

Performance Impacts Conversion

As the most important and powerful internet metric for online businesses, conversion rates holistically depend on website KPIs in establishing competitive advantages for online retail platforms.

In the cyber world, traditional marketing campaigns alone do not boost conversion rates without improvements in website user experience – comprising of page speed and website responsiveness.

Obama’s fundraising campaign during the 2011 Presidential Elections raised an additional $34 million when the Obama for America website shrunk page load time from 5 seconds to 2 seconds – that’s 14 percent increase in donation conversion with mere 3 seconds of website performance improvement!

Fast load times equal better conversions

Bringing potential customers to the doorstep of brick-and-mortar retail stores often requires a thoroughly planned marketing and advertisement campaign. And once customers enter the shop, they usually don’t leave without a purchase.

It takes far fewer efforts in bringing online customers to visit an online retail store – internet users don’t mind a few wayward clicks to open the Web pages they’ve never visited before. Search engine optimization and social media adverts often do the trick.

Equally convenient for visitors is to leave the site if the required information is not made available within a bearable few seconds – for unimpressed visitors, that doesn’t take a lot more than a few wayward clicks either!

User experience in terms of website performance and responsiveness, therefore, becomes the ultimate factor impacting conversion rates in online marketplaces. Ecommerce is first and foremost all about customer convenience and reaching potential customers efficiently with the right information, products, and services at the right time.

Neither of which is possible without page speeds faster than users abandoning visits due to website performance concerns. Not aware of your website performance impacting conversion rates? Tools like Google’s Test My Site tool can help answer that question (see example below).

Conversion speed calculator

Performance Impacts User Engagement

User engagement statistics feed the cauldron of website analytics in developing the best strategies to optimize online sales. Online businesses established in the competitive cyberspace well understand the importance of website performance and tools that analyze and predict next-best actions correlating page speed and revenue.

Enhanced user engagement information with responsive and fast-loading websites is often seen as a proxy for online business success. User engagement is highly dependent upon human limitations in storing short-term memory beyond a few seconds, and human aspirations of feeling in control over the machine under all circumstances.

Underperforming websites

For underperforming websites – notice underperformance being a relative term – page load times exceed human limitations, whereas failure to process user requests gives the false impression of ignorance or incompetence in delivering the desired response efficiently and accurately.

High-performing websites

High-performing websites on the other hand – notice high-performing being a relative term as well – impact three parameters that determine user engagement: user feelings, user mental states, and user interactions. These three aspects create an emotional, cognitive and behavioral connection between human visitors (can’t say much about bots!) and the website.

With this connection in place, online businesses can exploit user engagement characters such as focused attention, motivation and trust in converting visitors into customers, repeat customers and even brand ambassadors generating leads across the social media and outside of the internet world.

Performance Impacts OpEx and Revenue

While investing in website performance optimization adds to the CapEx in favor of shaving off a few seconds in page load times, the return is inevitably seen in the shape of rising revenues and shrinking operational cost and hardware investments.

Ecommerce giant Shopzilla saw a 50 percent reduction in its operational budget by shrinking page load times from 7 seconds to 2 seconds. Performance improvements with a website design overhaul enabled the company to utilize the same hardware resources to efficiently in processing the same amount of website user requests. The improved website responsiveness also increased revenues by 12 percent as the retail store accommodated expanding web traffic without prompting additional investments in consequently expanding hardware resources.

Improvements in website KPI also lead to a better Google AdWords Quality Score and therefore reduce the Cost per Click (CPC). Online businesses with a high-quality score and page speed are able to spend advertisement budget efficiently and effectively, thereby maximizing reach and attracting customers without necessitating additional OpEx.

A slowdown, on the other hand, minimizes resource utilization. Bing conducted an independent study on its website performance affecting revenue and found a 2 seconds delay in delivering search query incurred a revenue loss of 4.3 percent per user.

And customer behavior doesn’t alter drastically when the delays are removed. When Google removed a delay of 0.4 seconds in providing search results, users still made 0.21 percent fewer searches even with the web page performing optimally.

Additional efforts in enhancing website performance may stretch CapEx temporarily, but the tradeoff is ultimately justified as the extra investments translate into higher bottom line, increased revenue streams and minimum operational expenses.

Performance Impacts Usability

Websites with the steepest learning curve achieve the highest customer lock-in. Internet users consider the time taken in learning to use alternate websites as a significant switching cost, which acts as a mechanism to lock them into online services offered via high-performance websites.

The relationship elements between website usability and customer loyalty are tied down to website KPIs, including page speed, load time and website responsiveness to user requests. A hypothetical model of website speed optimization puts these elements into consideration, with characteristics such as Site Trust, Interactivity and Information relevance considered as a subset of website usability by end-users.

Similarly, web crawlers and search engines measure website performance in terms of page speed, navigability, user experience, responsiveness and reachability to a global audience as a subset of search engine optimization impacting search rankings.

Usability traits

End-users expect the following traits affecting the usability of websites:

• Easy to operate, navigate and understand.
• Directly deliver relevant information and controls being sought.
• Accessible across all device form factors, machines, operating systems, browsers and geographic locations.
• Delivering legitimate, credible and high-quality information, products and services with minimal clicks and browser requests.

Fulfilling these intents is vital to maximizing website performance, usability and customer loyalty, all of which are the overlapping elements of the single system that works as a channel to online business success.

Chapter 3: Speed Optimized Mobile Website Overshadows Desktop

Mobile is the future of everything wired. Adoption is skyrocketing as the mobile device onslaught looks to encompass the entire human race – 2.32 billion smartphone subscriptions, around thirty percent of the global population in 2017. And the booming tides of stimulating repercussions continue to disturb online businesses barely making inroads into the mobile internet marketing segment.

Success in the cyber world depends on the ability to embrace a mobile-first approach in reaching the exploding population of mobile subscribers. And for organizations pushing to reach the massive mobile population effectively, the unimaginable awards emerge just around the corner.

Mobile vs desktop

Desktop internet marketing, on the other hand, is so last decade-ish. Google the terms “Post PC Era”, “freefall of PC sales” and the “death of desktop machines”, and what returns is a myriad of journalistic fodder portraying a bleak future for organizations still lingering around the desktop internet user-base only.

For such industry laggards, it’s not too late to embrace a mobile-first strategy, yet. However, this approach doesn’t always pay off for forward-looking online businesses either when they fail to optimize their reach to a mobile user-base.

That’s not as much for taking a false direction in going mobile than missing a few vital steps and not filling the void in reaching mobile customers efficiently and effectively. These gaps center on the lack of responsive and high performing mobile websites.

Mobile vs. Desktop – Why does it Matter?

Because everyone else is doing it, to start with. Competition for the mobile space is intense and back in 2014, the Yahoo CEO labeled it as the “tipping point” for the internet. And she was right! Stone Temple pulled some statistics from Similar Web in 2017 and not to our surprise, but mobile accounted for over 50% of the traffic based on 77 billion website visits.

Aggregated total visits on desktop vs mobile (Img src: Stone Temple)

Here are a few additional statistics:

• 87% of U.S. citizens own mobile devices.
• 45% of these own smartphones.
• 90% of these go online via mobile.
• These mobile users average 1.4 hours of mobile internet browsing every day.
• 74% would abandon mobile websites that don’t load within 5 seconds.

The entire focus should lie on treating the two entities – mobile and desktop – separately, at least from a website design standpoint. Without this strategy, mobile user experience in accessing desktop versions of websites is usually compromised in terms of page load times, usability and functionality. Compromising these core aspects of mobile websites can force online businesses into facing the obvious negative implications including:

• Low Mobile Purchases: Mobile internet shoppers have a shorter attention span and lower patience than desktop internet users.
• Losing Competition: According to a survey of over a thousand U.S. adult smartphone users, almost 75 percent of the respondents said they prefer revisiting mobile ecommerce sites that deliver high-end mobile user experience.
• Losing Brand Value: Poorly designed mobile websites that simply shrink the HTML of full desktop website version for visitors to zoom in and out in navigating through mobile Web pages makes users less likely to engage with the company in the future.

These consequences negate the following primary objectives of reaching customers via mobile internet:

• Expanding customer-base.
• New advertisement options.
• Offering quality services efficiently at user convenience.
• And most concerning, the inevitability in productively embracing mobile web for business development.

Desktop and mobile differ in technology resources, form factor and user interface – all aspects governing website performance optimization implementations. Without optimizing mobile websites separately to deliver the best mobile website performance, several website KPIs degrade and negatively impact mobile user-experience.

And since mobile technologies give users the ability to search the web on-the-go, while standing, walking or even lying comfortably on the couch, the hunger to feel in control of website operations drives user expectations beyond conventional standards applicable only in the desktop arena. The ability to deliver mobile website content within this short attention span of around 2 seconds makes all the difference in winning customer loyalty and long-term business relationship with mobile internet users.

Web objectives

High-Performance Mobile Website and the Competitive Space of High Conversions

Considering the high volume of internet traffic using mobile devices for ecommerce purchases, high-performing mobile websites is an evident priority for ecommerce organizations. A recent research study reveals ecommerce businesses could miss out on millions of mobile shoppers with the potential aggregate revenue per conversion of mobile shoppers averaging around 80 percent of the same among desktop users purchasing online.

The conversion rate among small ecommerce businesses operating on low-performance mobile websites is typically 0.6 percent in comparison with the 1.6 percent conversion rate of desktop ecommerce providers in the same size segment.

Tablet users, on the other hand, spend 20 percent more than desktop users. By capturing this audience, online businesses making inroads into the mobile internet marketing segment can expect high revenue streams that could potentially replace desktop audience one day – although that day currently seems to be a bit too far into the future.

Website revenue streams

Nevertheless, the demand to satisfy the needs of mobile users will continue to rise exponentially. Search Engine Optimization of mobile websites is now a separate trade – and so is mobile website speed optimization, which constitutes of:

• High page speed
• Low page load times
• Efficient delivery of media-rich content
• Download speed
• Optimal site format
• Easy navigation and usability across the website
• And a fully functional website requiring minimal user-input in performing an otherwise complex task of mobile internet usage.

By addressing these issues, micro-sites in the mobile internet sector can hope to compete with their larger counterparts enjoying up to 1.2 percent conversion rates (that’s twice as much as desktop-site conversion rates!), and well over 80 percent of revenue per conversion achieved with the desktop versions of their sites.

Fastest to the Finish Line Stand Tallest on the Podium

It, therefore, is no surprise that Fortune 100 companies average 5 seconds in page load times for their mobile websites – that’s two seconds faster than the average acceptable standards (7 seconds max).

Average page load times

For ecommerce merchants, however, 5 seconds of page load time is perhaps sufficient to put visitors off toward a faster alternative. And in the retail segment, some websites load as fast as Google – page load times as low as 1 second!
Strikingly fast, perhaps a bit Google-like focus on page speed and website responsiveness. That, however, is the average page load time of 16 of the top 100 multichannel retailers reaping the rewards of an insanely-fast mobile website and thereby yielding multi-billion dollar revenue figures from mobile customers.

Google describes a number of changes (here and here) in mobile website design to render Web pages on mobile screens well within 1 second – that’s even if you’re not a Fortune 100 company or a Top 100 eCommerce retailer!
For those uber-geeks taking mobile Web development matters into their own hands, the non-profit World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides a handful of best practices (here and here). It’s a long read, demonstrating how important and intensive mobile website optimization really is!

And for business owners employing Web developers to design highly responsive and speed-optimized mobile websites, the improvements should be sought in the following three ingredients of mobile website anatomy:

• Fluid grids
• Flexible images
• Media queries

And a design focus on the following mobile website elements:

• Masthead
• Image gallery
• Product description
• Auxiliary information
• Footer

Customers appreciate fast responding websites and ultra-low page load times. Mobile technology and the innovation coming along with increasing reliance on smartphones and tablets are showing no signs of slowing down. Top online retailers understand the need to deliver website content efficiently from Web servers to the tiny real estate of mobile screens. Getting it right with thoroughly designed websites dedicated to mobile platforms enables customers to make quick and educated purchase decisions that ultimately create never-ending revenue streams for online businesses.

Mobile purchasing

60 percent of consumers use mobile devices exclusively to make quick purchase decisions. Mobile devices and desktop computers or laptops are considered equally important as the media source of information – 42 percent of internet users favor of mobile as opposed to 43 percent for PC/laptop – but the convenience in accessing the Web via mobile devices is driving mobile internet usage and business opportunities.

And if you still plan to overlook mobile website performance, you might want to reconsider the opportunities and success otherwise achievable mostly with a dedicated, speed-optimized mobile website.

Chapter 4: Common Business Mistakes that Kill Website Performance

Online marketplaces – like battlegrounds of the ancient Greeks – are high-stake competitive platforms where only the most diligent survive. And as with all high-stakes battles, human factors (decision errors, blunders, and ignorance) contribute significantly toward the outcome of online business competitions.

Yet, online businesses and webmasters responsible for maintaining high-performance and fully-optimized websites tend to overlook crucial web design elements that cripple site load times. And the consequences are usually as hazardous as the Trojan Horse penetrating through fortified defenses and taking full control over the City of Troy, despite the size and dominion of the Trojan Army.

Competition for online business success is just as intense if only a bit less violent. The fight for customer attention boils down to delivering the requested content most efficiently and accurately, irrespective of the company size and past laurels. And just like human blunders and ignorance dictating the outcome of the Trojan War, common mistakes killing website performance tend to determine the outcome of online business competition – fastest to the finish line wins the race!

The fastest website load time wins

The aptly named Gap of Death, the interval between expected page load time of under 2 seconds and average site load time of 5 seconds expands or contracts due to surprisingly neglected website optimization tactics and business decisions. Contrary to the popular sentiment, speed optimization is ideally implemented across all stages of website development, and not just after building the entire site, which is only when website owners realize the need to push for website performance optimization.

Final tweaks and speed optimization add-ons implemented after developing websites does improve page speed though, bringing down the load time to at least reach the Gap of Death. But even within this performance zone, conversion rates go down by 7 percent for each second of delay after the expected page load time of 2 seconds.

On the other hand, website owners wary of speed optimization tactics can aim for higher website performance by avoiding the following deadly mistakes as well:

Mediocre Web Hosting Service

The mistake of opting for a mediocre Web hosting service can live forever. With over 1.8 billion websites online as of 2020, the web hosting space is both crowded and fractured. Global availability of a vast array of hosting options is pushing businesses and hobbyists to establish their presence in the cyber world. The demand for cost-effective web hosting services is rising exponentially, and hosting providers are more than willing to compromise service quality in accumulating market share with low-cost tiers.

Mediocre web hosts selling cost-effective services continue to maximize profitability by hosting thousands of websites on single instances of bloated Apache stacks. Un-optimized servers running thousands of public websites on a single server stack is particularly harmful to ecommerce websites characterized by uncontrollable web traffic spikes, multimedia content and large website files.

Web hosting and development companies with a common response to speed optimization concerns that “everyone’s got broadband these days” translates directly into financial losses and damaged brand reputation for online businesses. Attractive website performance is critical to the success of ecommerce businesses since websites taking more than 3 seconds to load immediately lose 40 percent of the traffic. 79 percent of dissatisfied visitors almost never return to slow ecommerce sites!

Web hosting services

Perhaps then, investing time and money in pursuing the highest quality web hosting services is key to maintaining high-performance websites generating vast revenue streams by attracting visitor attention efficiently and accurately.

Giving Way to Bandwidth Thieves

Website speed optimization is an ongoing and evolving process and goes well beyond subscribing to the best web hosting services in the world. Some business decisions intended to maximize revenue by altering website design and features adversely affect website performance by stealing size-able chunks from the bandwidth allotted to each individual visitor.

Too Many Widgets or Plugins

Additional features and functionality always pleases website owners and developers. Widgets and plugins enable convenient changes to existing websites along with a slight burden on website performance. Even with the smallest of widgets such as the Google+ button box, the burden to website performance in terms of page load time can increase by as much as 2 seconds in some instances.

The Facebook like box is another common slow down as it has been known to easily add 40+ HTTP requests (as seen below). On a clients site, we saw that it added 700 KB to the overall page weight, which is not good!

Facebook widget requests

Keeping add-ons limited to a bare minimum is essential to maintaining optimum website performance – even plugins installed to the same website core compete in delivering the quickest response to browser requests, ultimately draining bandwidth.

Sometimes the quality and functionality of plugins installed matters far more than the number itself. Plugins that query large streams of data to perform complex operations should do this off-server, and not within the website hosting environments such as WordPress.

Too Many Ads and External Services

Tempting as it may seem, selling too much real estate to third-party advertisers drastically degrades website performance. Too many ads or slow loading ads drive bounce rates and negatively impact online marketability. The financial losses that come with high bounce rates outweigh the monetary benefits of handing over vast website spaces to advertisers.

Pingdom external services

External services typically bring with them two problems. One is brought about by sheer volume, the other has to do with waiting until they load.

• If you have a lot of external services, you need to load all of them and wait for information from them on each page load. The more calls you have, the more you wait, the higher the load on your own server, and the higher chance you have of bumping into the second issue.
• In some cases, the page load will wait until the data transfer is completed between your site and the external service. If the service is called in the header and there is a service interruption your page will simply refuse to load.

According to one research study, the cost of generating revenue with a banner advertisement is almost 33 percent of additional latency. Intrusive pop-up ads further aggravate visitors into abandoning websites at even higher rates.
Affiliate code, even just those few additional lines of the script takes up valuable memory space on the hosting environment and requires additional processing cycles in delivering the content to end-users.

Nevertheless, online advertisement is the primary source of income for many online businesses (think Google and Facebook!), and an optimal website advertisement model goes a long way in increasing website revenue while minimizing the cost of latency and page load delays.

Bloated Design Theme and Incompatible Multimedia

Tempting website design themes and multimedia content are head turners for online traffic. That is if the content even reaches the eyes of impatient visitors fast enough. High-quality images and videos (large pixels, large file size) take longer in downloading onto requesting browsers, whereas low quality, lightweight graphics barely capture user attention despite their lower load times.

However, graphics intensive content is not always the deciding factor in driving conversions and sales. This is especially true for ecommerce websites that must contain fast-loading product images and videos describing the value of products, and not necessarily their visual beauty.

Compatibility issues also affect multimedia and application performance for certain browsers and geographic locations. Take Google Chrome and Shockwave Flash as an example. The two rarely play nice to each other. Similarly, government restrictions can also prevent specific multimedia content from reaching local visitors.

Websites with non-functional multimedia content take excessive client-server communication cycles to reach requesting browsers, ultimately deteriorating website performance. It is, however, up to website owners to ensure streamlined serviceability across all browser platforms, device form factors and geographic locations as government policies and browser compatibility potentially changes over time, and most often, unpredictability as well.

Streamline content

Fast loading and fully functional multimedia content are necessary for eCommerce merchants to keep hold of website visitors. Every second of delay in page load time leads to frustrated visitors abandoning slow websites, and drawing along a 7 percent loss in conversion rates, 11 percent fewer page views, and a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction.

And a Bit More of that Code – Sign Up Forms and Analytics

Sign up forms and analytics code add only a few lines to website core files. But when too many single-lines of code take space on the website back-end, web content assets and plugins with lengthy code end up competing for tiny memory spaces in short processing cycles. As a result, the popular physics phenomenon of non-linearity kicks in, and each component performs unpredictably, usually consuming more processing cycles than expected.

From the perspective of end users, excessive services are often unnecessary or at most, considered secondary to the actual content portrayed by the website. Many websites host more than 80 assets (images, plugins, add-ons and other multimedia content), and all of this content is not necessarily delivered to requesting browsers as per user preferences. Additional investments in developing media-rich websites ultimately backfire when the information actually requested to reach end-users is held by irrelevant sign-up forms, analytics code and other content adding unnecessary weight to the website.

Mobile Mistakes and Misguided Redirects

Global smartphone subscription is expected to surpass the 2.7 billion mark by 2019, when 83 percent of internet users will access the internet via mobile devices. 30 percent of ecommerce website traffic in 2016 came from mobile, and this number continues to rise exponentially with the exploding smartphone user-base.

Smartphones

The competition to capture the attention of mobile users is even more intense due to slow loading mobile websites and lower visitor patience levels. 60 percent of mobile users expect mobile websites to load within 3 seconds. And on average, 3 in 4 people will abandon a mobile website if it takes any longer than 5 seconds to load, whereas an average mobile takes even longer periods of 6-10 seconds to load.

Excessive delays in mobile page load time occur mostly when websites are not specifically optimized and designed to deliver high performance on a mobile device interface. Even with dedicated smartphone-optimized pages, mobile users are not always redirected to the intended mobile-versions of desktop website pages requested from mobile browsers.

Redirects are instructions that send users seeking one website URL to another one that (supposedly) contains the exact information requested by users. Redirects are most effective for mobile users searching for desktop versions of website pages that must be mapped well to equivalent mobile versions in delivering the best mobile website experience.

Doing so inaccurately keeps users from switching between unwanted website files until they reach the right one. This causes unnecessary delays in loading the information actually sought by end-users.

This is analogous to finding an empty parking spot in a large, crowded parking lot, and reaching the apparently empty space only to find out it’s occupied by a small vehicle that wasn’t visible from the distance. The process continues until a free space is finally reached – that is if the driver even continues searching for the empty space and isn’t frustrated enough to leave the parking lot altogether.

Bad redirects

Website owners are eventually responsible for losing competitive advantages in the mobile space when the mobile web traffic is simply redirected toward irrelevant desktop website version, instead of delivering a speed-optimized mobile solution for mobile visitors.

Websites not speed-optimized for mobile devices suffer from common issues hampering mobile user experience. Issues such as faulty redirects, unplayable videos, bloated images and graphics, irrelevant cross-linking and unnecessary assets delivered to mobile visitors degrade website performance and ultimately drive bounce rates.

Only 10 percent of the waiting period is defined by the HTML response to browser requests, and the remaining 90 percent of the delay is caused in rendering pages, parsing HTML, executing code scripts and retrieving embedded assets. Website performance overhaul with optimization tools and script tweaks can scrape off sizeable chunks from page load times, but perhaps not as effectively as developing a speed optimized website from scratch. And the latter is more of a marketing strategy, a business decision and slight awareness in avoiding the most common mistakes that can potentially ruin online businesses by killing website performance.

Chapter 5: Website Speed Testing – Identify Performance Bottlenecks!

Web traffic and search engine ranking is primarily a vanity metric for website performance. Important as they are, neither is more indicative of online business success than sales figures and conversion rates. Putting things into perspective, ecommerce websites with (almost) zero percent bounce rate, 15 percent conversion rates and 10,000 unique website visitors from low search engine rankings fare far better than high ranking sites enjoying 100,000 unique visits with only 0.01 percent conversion rate.

The debate of conversion rate optimization can carry on for encyclopedic lengths, and implementing business best-practices on Frankensteinish websites can take tons of investments with efforts of patient execution spanning across months before any significant conversion rate improvement is yielded.

And there’s more to convincing impatient citizens of the cyber world into purchasing online products and services than implementing passive business strategies to enhance marketability. Online businesses focusing on improving website performance experience immediate results in the form of higher conversion rates and sky-rocketing sales.

Page speed, in particular, fills the void in enhancing marketability by improving website user experience to keep impatient online customers engaged and satisfied. A recent research report published by O’Reilly concludes improvements in website end-user experience by reducing page load time boost sales and conversion rates significantly. The staggering statistics are as follows:

• +3%conversions per second with page load time improvement from 15 seconds to 7 seconds.
• +2%conversions per second with page load time improvement from 7 seconds to 5 seconds.
• +1%conversions per second with page load time improvement from 4 seconds to 2 seconds.

These statistics only describe how page speed impacts business success in the competitive cyberspace. Complicated as it seems, slicing off large chunks of page load time from slow loading websites is a relatively low-hanging fruit IF speed optimization tactics are implemented in the right direction – that’s a huge IF when performance bottlenecks are unknown, too complex or simply too vast and diverse to identify.

The pursuit for speed optimized website begins with identifying critical front-end issues most apparent under standard website performance testing processes. Google’s Head Performance Engineer Steve Souders advises on this matter, saying “80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Start here”.

What to Test?

Before the exploration for page speed bumps begins, understanding the behavior of the most impactful website speed performance indicators helps to accurately identify performance loopholes in websites.

Initial Page Speed

Downloading tons of memory hogging website content within milliseconds of initiating browser requests is not entirely possible without a thorough revamp and speed optimization of slow websites. In many cases, visitors only seek the primary information in the form of content or product information portrayed by Web pages. Add a lot of complementary graphics and website features, and page rendering times rise beyond measure.

Initial page speed

Keeping the initial page speed high keeps visitors engaged even when the entire website content including bulky graphics takes ages to render completely. Monitoring high initial page speed by tracking parameters such as Time to First Byte (TTFB) or performing ping requests from website servers accurately describes initial page load times and page speed statistics. If these take too long, work needs to be done at the back-end in the form of server-side and website core optimization.

Full Page Load Time

Monitoring the time consumed in rendering entire page content onto requesting browsers is an integral element of end-user website experience testing. This information drives strategic IT decisions in deploying and optimizing hardware infrastructure to maximize website performance.

Regularly monitoring this performance indicator enables website owners to realize how the website performs as it scales in terms of size and content type. With this information, webmasters can cache static content in separate locations such as Content Delivery Network (CDN) while maintaining dedicated back-end servers to efficiently deliver dynamically-loaded content.

Geographic Performance

One of the perks of operating an online business is the ever-expanding global market reach. But this reach is not always equally efficient – and hence effective – across the globe due to the very factors that limit client-server communication. Government policies, bandwidth and technology limitations prevent optimum website performance around the world, so website speed and availability tests should be conducted across disparate locations to determine global website performance results impacting world-wide business reach.

Geographic website performance

Load Tolerance

Website performance varies with fluctuations in web traffic. Hosting servers handling the normal load at peak performance may lose page speed under excessive loads. Conducting stress tests, ramp tests, load tests and other performance tests on websites creates an accurate picture of how much web traffic the website can handle before losing performance or going down altogether. Compare the results with the website’s actual usage patterns to determine whether the website needs hardware upgrades to handle peak load as efficiently as possible.

Web Server CPU Load

Shared hosting providers running thousands of websites on single Apache servers fail to deliver high performance even when the website is well-designed with a clean and speed-optimized code. Performance issues intensify during peak load times when insufficient server computing power fails to process website download requests efficiently. Monitoring server CPU load enables hosting companies and IT staff running locally hosted websites to keep a check on back-end hardware capabilities in handling unpredictable web traffic deluge.

Website Database Performance

Database performance is critical for websites maintaining dynamic content pulled from back-end databases. A mechanism should be in place to detect and alert for inaccuracies in data transmission. Keeping an eye on free disk space on servers hosting websites locally helps avoid errors and data losses that lead to broken links and eventually degrade website performance.

How to Test

Website owners can leverage an array of free and premium website performance testing services to analyze web pages and generate tailored solutions to fill the deepest of performance loopholes hampering page speed.

Website speed Test

Page speed testing tools powered by search engine giant Google, website monitoring specialists Pingdom and GTMetrix yield valuable insights into website performance indicators for free, and programmatically generate scores and suggestions to educate non-geeky website owners. Check out these in-depth guides to help you get started.

How These Tools Work

These tools use a bunch of browsers to load websites and replicate end-user website experience across disparate geographic locations. Performance bottlenecks are monitored across various elements of the web page under scrutiny including file size, load time, response time and requests pertaining to various website parts (JavaScript, CSS files, HTML, images, etc.).

The tools generate performance scores based on a set of rules developed in the context of Web page performance and user priorities. The principles include resource caching, client-server round-trip times, data download and upload size, and a host of rules impacting end-user website experience in terms of page speed.

Suggestions are generated in anticipation of page speed improvements that should occur by implementing appropriate performance optimization rules. For example, if a large image file is served uncompressed, monitoring tools would recommend implementation of various measures to compress the bulky file. Such issues otherwise go unnoticed due to human errors or plain ignorance, neither of which can be completely eliminated. At the same time, page speed monitoring tools would at least empower website owners to identify the issues and take appropriate steps in eradicating hidden website performance bottlenecks.

Testing Tutorial

The following Test was conducted using the free Pingdom website speed Test tool. Visit Pingdom and conduct the Test selecting various geographic locations according to the options provided, and compare the end-results. Enter your website and hit the Test Now button.

Pingdom

It will then return a summary of your site, including a performance grade, a total load time, the total page size, and the number of requests you have on your website.

Pingdom summary

The performance insights section of the Pingdom speed Test tool is very helpful. These are all based on the Google PageSpeed Insight rules. Generally, if you improve these on your site, you should see a decrease in your overall load times.

Pingdom performance insights

The tool lists all downloaded files in a waterfall chart form, sorting it in terms of load order, load time, size, type or URL.

Pingdom waterfall requests

Analyze the performance of each file download by reading results against the key chart provided within the tool:

Pingdom charts

The tool helps to identify the next-best actions for website speed optimization tactics. In the sample Test shown above, the tested website needs to fix some errors for requests that aren’t being found. However, it’s important to understand that optimizing these website design elements is an ongoing and evolving process that starts from the ground-level of website development and implemented across all new pages as the website scales.

If you need more help troubleshooting your site’s performance on Pingdom, check out our deep dive into the tool.

Which Tool to Pick?

Different tools – Google’s Page Speed Insights, Pingdom and GTMetrix, among others – identify different issues, Test different performance parameters and indicators in different ways, from different browsers and geographic locations. Performance ratings and Test results are therefore bound to be different, and no single tool identifies every single performance bottleneck in website designs. It is however recommended that you stick with one tool as you make improvements to better monitor your progress.

However, testing across multiple tools, analyzing different website design elements and comparing multiple Test results provides reasonable insights for online business owners to devise speed optimization strategies for their websites.

Chapter 6: How to Improve Website Speed?

Developing a great website takes great work. Leading online businesses leverage industry-proven experience, supernatural web development skills and a killer web hosting service to develop websites boasting top-notch performance figures and user experience. But for those who miss this starting point in their pursuit of speed-optimized websites, employing a minimalistic approach in executing simple DIY page speed optimization tactics works (almost) well enough to patch slow websites.

The knowledge of investing in the right set of website speed optimization solutions and services, website management and perhaps downright coding trickery is essential to yield maximum website performance. Strategic business decisions based on this knowledge contribute directly toward enhancing website performance that in turn, lead to better online sales, leads, conversions and ultimately business success.

Website speed optimization

Optimization is the buzzword of success in the cyber world. Cyberspace, like the real physical world of planets, stars and galaxies is itself in flux – a state of continuous change and evolution. In fact, change is the only consistent process across both the real and the cyber world. Survival in these spaces depends on how well the inhabitants can adapt to varying resources and environmental circumstances.

And the same goes for website owners competing for online business success amid varying market trends, changing the behavior of internet visitors, advancements in cyber technologies at breakneck speeds under Moore’s Law and varying website performance standards set forth by search engine giants.

DIY Speed Optimization

Online business owners and webmasters adapt their websites to maintain optimal results under the consistent impression of change by improvising and optimizing key elements of website design that make or break page speed.

Image Optimization

As a general rule of thumb, larger files take longer to download than smaller files. Web page download time, also known as the Page Load Time depends on the total size of content assets being downloaded from hosting servers to the requesting browser. High-quality bulky images are the largest contributors to web page size, degrading page speed and agitating visitors eagerly waiting for the web page to load.

According to HTTP Archive, as of December 2017, images make up on average 66% of a total webpage’s weight. The following image optimization best-practices go a long way in reducing the negative impact of images on website speed:

• Format Selection: Use JPGs when quality is a high priority and image modifications are not required before uploading it. JPGs can take limited processing and modifications before image quality degrades sharply. For images with icons, logos, illustrations, signs, and text, use PNG format. Use GIFs only for small or simple images and avoid BMPs or TIFFs.
• Proper Sizing: Save valuable bytes of image payload and match the dimensions (width) of your Web page template. Use browser resizing capabilities to make images responsive by setting fixed width and auto-height instructions.
• Compression: Image compression should be a thoughtful tradeoff between image size and quality. For JPGs, a compression of 60-70 percent produces a good balance. For retina screens, increase (JPGs) image size by 150-200 percent, compress by 30-40 percent and scale it down again as per the required dimensions.
• Fewer Images: Keep the number of images to an absolute minimum.

WordPress Solutions:

Leverage image optimization plugins such as Imagify, ShortPixel Image Optimizer, Optimus WordPress Image Optimizer, WP Smush, TinyPNG, EWWW Image Optimizer Cloud. It’s even better if you go with the ones that compress and optimize images externally, which reduces the load on your own site.

And for more tips check out our in-depth image optimization guide.

Optimize CSS Code and Delivery

Not so long ago, 30 KB was considered as the ideal web page size. And that included images, content, graphics, and code making the entire page. The popularity of CSS and JavaScript ripped apart the ceiling of 30 KB page size in delivering enriched website user experience.

Yet, modern websites coded in CSS are better at downloading content from hosting servers to requesting browsers efficiently and accurately. Optimization, therefore, isn’t all about minifying file size. The following best practices ensure a speed-optimized CSS delivery:

Optimized CSS delivery

• Shorthand Coding: Cut down the size of your code by using fewer declarations and operators. Fewer lines of code mean fewer processing cycles and efficient delivery of website files to requesting browsers.
• Axe Browser Specific CSS Hacks: CSS is in danger from endlessly complicated browser specific hacks – or correctional declarations as they’re called – adding unnecessary weight to CSS script files. Speed optimized CSS code is both light and simple for servers to process efficiently.
• Minify CSS: Almost all website speed monitoring tools give a common suggestion of reducing the weight of CSS code to improve speed. Lightweight and compact code helps to speed up downloading, parsing and execution to drastically reduce page load time.
• Code Positioning: Load CSS code inside the <head> and JavaScript inside the body, as referencing CSS outside of this section prevents Web browsers displaying CSS content immediately after downloading it.
• CSS Delivery Best Practices:
  • Do not use @import call.
  • Remove unused CSS.
  • Do not use CSS in HTML such as H1 and DIV tags.
  • Use inline small CSS.

WordPress Solutions:

Tools such as Autoptimize, WP Rocket, Cache Enabler, CloudFlare CDN, and W3 Total Cache are some of the most popular tools available for minifying JavaScript and CSS.

Minification – JavaScript, CSS, HTML

Indeed, speed optimization isn’t (just) about shrinking page size. Reducing the number of client-server requests in delivering website content to Web browsers is an integral part of website speed optimization. Webmasters can achieve this by not making too many folks with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript requests. Although the number of requests isn’t as important as they used to be thanks to improvements with HTTP/2. That is to say, optimize, minify, and squish all unnecessary and compressible code lines.

Minification is particularly important for inline JavaScript and external files not cached. Google recommends minifying all JavaScript files over 4096 bytes of size, and a shaving off a minimum of 25 bytes to produce any noticeable difference toward page load time.

Compression

A rigorous approach toward designing speed optimized website would incorporate a strong intent on eliminating unnecessary bytes from the code. Utilizing all the coding space available, deleting extra spaces, indentation and line spaces while maintaining readability of the code reduces the overall size of website core and front-end files. And for websites already developed without this strategy in perspective, combining multiple server requests (for HTML, JavaScript, and CSS) into single ones effectively slashes sizeable chunks from page load times.

However, overindulgence in HTML Minification potentially leads to loss of fidelity of the website code, with user agents taking excessive memory cycles and CPU power in “guessing” the missing resources required to parse HTML files. Monitoring page load performance changes in response to implementing each minification process individually ensure that only the unnecessary code and spaces are deleted.

Minification of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML share common benefits: reduced network latency, fewer HTML requests, enhanced compression, faster browser downloading and execution, ultimately boosting page speed and yielding higher scores on website speed measuring tools.

Plugins – Less is More!

Additional website functionality with plugins comes at a price: performance degradation. Unfortunately, webmasters deploy a myriad of plugins to add attractive but often unnecessary features such as gravatar, profile tools, website stats and font tools – some even use 10 different plugins for social media integration. The only benefit here is successfully avoiding manual coding.

Many popular websites carry as much as 80 plugins. Yet, the number is not entirely a concern if the installed plugins are developed well to avoid complex actions and expensive server processing.

Number of plugins

Four major areas to look at when it comes to selecting high-quality plugins:

• Does it perform complex operations?
• Does it load many content assets and scripts?
• Does it increase the number of database queries to each page request?
• Does it perform requests to external APIs?

If the answer to all these questions is YES, your reaction to the plugin in question should be a huge NO!

Now to the big question, how many plugins is too many?

While there’s no comprehensive answer to this question, limitations are unique to every website and plugin. A lot of WordPress experts recommend not using too many plugins. But many well-performing websites host over 80 plugins until they install one low-quality plugin that adds half a second to page load time.

Similarly, using 10 plugins for simple and unique tasks is much better than deploying one plugin to perform all of the complex tasks by itself. Exceptions include high-quality SEO plugins by credible developers, such as Yoast SEO, All In One SEO Pack (free WordPress SEO plugins) and the likes.

WordPress Solutions:

Use the following solutions to keep a check on WordPress plugins performance:

• NewRelic – application performance profiling solution
• Query Monitor

Limit/Disable WordPress Revisions

Revision management is one of the perks that WordPress has to offer. The CMS automatically keeps track of the content created on the CMS and makes all of it available for future changes. To the server, this costs unnecessary processing through additional database entries not actually required in the first place. Controlling the number of revisions stored relieves the website core of useless burden.

WordPress revisions

Writing the following code snippets in the wp-config.php file helps to get around this issue:

Disable Revisions:

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );

Limit Revisions:

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 10 ); // limited to 10 revisions

Check out our in-depth guide on how to optimize WordPress revisions for faster performance.

Optimize Databases

WordPress CMS stores posts, comments, pages and other forms of textual and encrypted data within a single database – except for images and videos that are stored in the ‘wp_content’ folder instead. This database gets crowded over time, not only with unnecessary content and post revisions, but also with garbage data.

Garbage content includes:

• Comments in the spam queue
• Unapproved comments
• Post revisions
• Trashed items such as posts and pages

Database optimization revolves around getting rid of garbage data and useless content from cluttered databases, shrinking them in size, and making it easier for website hosting servers to fetch requested content efficiently, within minimum processing cycles. This can also involve ensuring that you are using InnoDB for your MySQL database tables, as opposed to MyISAM. Learn how to convert MyISAM to InnoDB.

The wp_options table is also often overlooked when it comes to overall WordPress and database performance. Especially on older and large sites, this can be the culprit for slow query times on your site due to autoloaded data that is left behind from third-party plugins and themes. Check out our guide on how to clean up your wp_options table.

WordPress Solutions:

• Limit, disable and delete post revisions.
• Automatically purge trash by adding the following code in the wp-config.php file:define('EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 10 );10 is the number of days before garbage data is automatically deleted. Change as appropriate.

Compression

According to Google, every day the cyber world sees 99 years of human years wasted due to uncompressed Web content. And although most of the latest Web browsers support content compression capabilities, not every website delivers compressed contents. Visitors to these bandwidth-hogging websites experience insanely slow interactions with Web pages. Primary reasons for this unfavorable (and mostly unintentional) website behavior include misconfigured hosting servers, Web proxies, old or buggy browsers and antivirus software.

Uncompressed content hurts bandwidth-constrained users receiving the Web content in agonizingly lengthy page load times. Here’s the transcript of a common browser-server communication in delivering uncompressed content:

HTML compression

Browser: Hey, GET me /HeavyWeightChampion.html!

Server: On it! *server skims through the server and finds the file*

Server: There you go, 250 KB of response code.

Browser: Ouch! *end-user sweats, ultimately receiving the requested content in a few tens of seconds*. (Okay, client-server communication is perhaps a bit more formal and less dramatic than the above narrative.)

Most of the problem lies in the way client-server communication goes in the HTML world. HTML files (making almost the entire Web content) includes several redundant code instances. <Tags>, <Alts>, <HTML> and the likes are all the same stuff materializing repeatedly.

Google recommends the following compression tactics to deliver website content efficiently:

• Minify JavaScript, HTML and CSS
• Ensure consistency in CSS and HTML code with the following techniques:
  • Consistent casing – mostly lowercase.
  • Consistent quoting of HTML tag attributes.
  • Specify HTML attributes in the same order.
  • Specify CSS key-value pairs in the same order by alphabetizing them.
• Enable GZIP compression. GZIP finds similar strings and code instances, replaces them temporarily with shorter characters. Browsers decompress gzipped files, bringing them back to their original shape.

A few words of caution though:

• Do NOT GZIP (already compressed) images, PDF or other binary data.
• GZIP data only in the range of 150-1000 bytes in size. The speed of compression must be faster than the time taken in delivering the content uncompressed.
• Do NOT compress content for old browsers.

Not following the above recommendations actually increases file size and page load times due to the overhead of compression and decompression.

WordPress Solutions:

• Enable GZIP compression using W3 Total Cache plugin.
• The best way to enable GZIP compression is at the server-level of Apache or Nginx. Check out our GZIP compression guide.

Cache

Developers crave simplicity in website design code. Website code easier to create, read and maintain leads to efficient website development processes. This includes using the available code functions frequently to cut short extensive coding for specific website functionality.

However, adding too many extraneous loops and unnecessary code lines increases page rendering times by a few milliseconds. Influx a torrent of website traffic, and the milliseconds compound to plunge page speed well below acceptable standards.

Webmasters can reduce these response times by delivering cached copies of the requested content instead of rendering it repeatedly in response to every single user request that pings their server. Web cache is the mechanism of temporarily storing copies of web content to satisfy subsequent user requests from the cache database when specific conditions are met. This process reduces the number of client-server round trips taken in delivering (static) website content to requesting browsers.

WordPress cache

Website owners can enable caching with the following add-ons and configurations when hosting service providers do not provide server-side caching:

• W3 Total Cache
• Cache Enabler
• WP Rocket
• FastCGI Cache for Nginx and Drupal servers.

Along with static cacheable content, websites also host dynamic information containing unique attributes changing regularly for every end-user. Storing cached copies of non-reusable dynamic content, therefore, doesn’t make sense, even though rendering non-cached content is a painstakingly slow process.

Fragment Caching

This is the art of caching smaller elements of non-cacheable dynamic website content. When Web pages containing static and/or dynamic content are loaded, hosting servers process PHP code and query MySQL databases to fetch the requested content. These time-and-resource consuming processes are circumvented by delivering the desired output stored as a cached copy.

Fragment caching stores the output of some code blocks that remain unchanged across varied versions of the dynamic content. When the code runs and reaches the code block cached for a predetermined time, the server queries and delivers the cached output of this code instead of executing it repeatedly until the time limit reaches.

The end result is cache-optimized website content for maximum page speed even for eCommerce and membership-based websites handling intensely dynamic content. The Core Hosting actually provides four different types of caching, all of which are automatically done at the software or server-level. So there is no need to mess with third-party plugins.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN)

CDN is an extension of cache optimization designed to supercharge website performance aimed specifically at globally dispersed web traffic. CDNs consist of a network of servers hosting cached copies of web pages. Internet visitors requesting this information are directed to the nearest server within this network based on their geographic location.

Traditional benefits of CDN including performance boost, high availability, and page rank collectively lift the business bottom line. Check out all the reasons why you should be using a CDN. The Core Hosting includes a free HTTP/2 and IPv6-enabled WordPress CDN for all clients!

WordPress CDN

Switch to Managed Hosting!

WordPress essentially democratized the web by empowering citizens of the cyberworld to create their own blogs and launch products and services online with minimal investments. In general, website owners leverage one of the following hosting services to keep their websites up and running:

• Free hosting: Favorite to hobbyists.
• Shared hosting: Favorite to individuals developing an online business presence at the lowest cost.
• Dedicated or managed hosting: Favorite to serious individuals and small and midsize firms setting up an online presence.
• Collocated hosting: Favorite to large enterprises or government institutions with in-house IT teams to manage websites.

Among these, employing managed hosting for end-to-end website development and management services is the most cost-effective and productive option for maintaining an ultra-high performance website. Features of managed hosting services impacting page speed and website performance include:

• Performance optimization – compression, code minification, server-side caching, etc.
• Cache optimization.
• Content optimization for performance – image optimization, controlling garbage data, etc.
• Search engine optimization.
• Regular software updates.
• Plugin compatibility and deployment for best performance.
• Database optimization.
• Content delivery networks.
• Performance testing and monitoring.
• Lightweight and speed optimized servers.
• Server and website configuration and maintenance to minimize client-server roundtrips.
• Latest versions of PHP and MariaDB

WordPress is Faster With PHP 7

With the release of PHP 7 came huge performance gains! So big in fact, that it should be a priority over a lot of the small optimizations you might play around with on your WordPress site. The following benchmarks demonstrate significant performance improvements with PHP 7 over its previous iterations. PHP 7 allows the system to execute twice as many requests per second in comparison with PHP 5.6, at almost half of the latency.

PHP benchmarks by Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP Fluent Talk

We also ran our own PHP benchmarks. And similarly to the benchmarks above, we saw that PHP 7.3 could execute almost three times as many transactions (requests) per second as compared to PHP 5.6. PHP 7.3 is also on average 9% faster than PHP 7.2.

WordPress 5.0 PHP benchmarks

• WordPress 5.0 PHP 5.6 benchmark: 91.64 req/sec
• WordPress 5.0 PHP 7.0 benchmark results: 206.71 req/sec
• WordPress 5.0 PHP 7.1 benchmark results: 210.98 req/sec
• WordPress 5.0 PHP 7.2 benchmark results: 229.18 req/sec
• WordPress 5.0 PHP 7.3 benchmark results: 253.20 req/sec ?

Verdict

The performance gap between PHP 5.6 and the later versions of PHP are evident, and that is why The Core Hosting always offers the latest stable version. PHP 7.4, which is even faster, was officially released as of November 28th, 2019 and is now available for all The Core Hosting clients.

Conclusion: Website Speed Matters. A lot.

Phew, you’ve made it through the guide! Congratulations and thanks for reading it. We hope you found at least a couple of great bits of advice that you can act upon now! At The Core Hosting, we provide premium managed WordPress hosting services, and with our infrastructure, you can rest assured that all the server-side optimizations are taken care of. If you’d like, give our system a try.

Last, but not least, if you found our guide helpful please share it with your friends and followers!

If you enjoyed this article, then you’ll love The Core Hosting’s WordPress hosting platform. Turbocharge your website and get 24/7 support from our veteran WordPress team. Our Google Cloud powered infrastructure focuses on auto-scaling, performance, and security. Let us show you The Core Hosting difference! Check out our plans

Shared Hosting Plans

These are our most affordable and economical web hosting plans. Shared web hosting means multiple users share one physical server and it’s resources. It is recommended for customers that don’t have a large amount of incoming traffic. Almost every tool and modules required for common web applications are pre-installed here.

Advantages of The Core Hosting Shared Hosting

• Very economical. Our most affordable plan
• Our shared hosting is Fully-Managed, This way you do not have to worry about anything server related
• Easy to use cPanel based control panel.
• 400+ 1-click install scripts available
• Our servers run on Raid-10 hardware raids on SSD Drives
• Our servers are optimized to run your site at its optimal performance, and we never overload our servers, so that way there are resources available.
• Easily scale your website to VPS or Dedicated Servers with our no downtime migration process.

Disadvantages of Shared Hosting

• You will not be able to install any modules or programs that require server-side changes
• Since it’s a shared environment, issues with other sites sometimes will affect your site.
• It is not suitable for resource-intensive applications.
• You are not allowed to make any customization that will require server-side changes.

VPS Hosting Plans

A VPS ( Virtual Private Server ) is a shared server platform that mimics all features and functions of a dedicated server. A VPS will have its own operating system and customers will get access with full root privileges. This means you can install anything upon it and can customize the VPS as desired.

Advantages of The Core Hosting VPS Hosting

• You will get access to the server with full root privileges.
• You can choose your OS from the list of supported OS’s
• You can install any applications and can make any server-side changes.
• You can choose a stand-alone server or choose any supported control panels.
• You can upgrade or downgrade the resources anytime.

Disadvantages of VPS Hosting

• You will need a bit of technical knowledge to effectively manage the backend of a VPS server.
• VPS is a shared server platform that mimics all features and functions of a dedicated server. Instead, physical resources are being shared amongst customers. In rare situations, other server hosted on your same node may affect your VPS’s performance. ( depends on the virtualization technique. )

Dedicated Hosting Plans

It’s an actual physical server with real hardware and resources. Techs at our Datacenter will be doing the server provisioning and upgrades. If you want to know more about our datacenters and network, the details are available in the following links.

Advantages of The Core Hosting Dedicated Hosting

• Suitable for high resource-intensive applications.
• Recommended if you are are getting high incoming traffic.
• You can choose to install any OS’s.
• Extreme reliability and performance.

Disadvantages of Dedicated Hosting

• Expensive when compared to our VPS and Shared plans.

I hope now you have an idea about our different hosting plans. If you are still confused about which plan to choose, please contact our sales team and we will help you.

Knowing your options for web hosting will help avoid half-cooked results when setting up your website. Whether you are redesigning your site or putting it together for the first time, you will want to find a hosting package with the greatest potential to bake…..erm host your site the best.

One of the decisions you’ll have to make is choosing between shared hosting and virtual private server (VPS) hosting.

Both have their pros and con, and neither is inherently bad – It really all depends on what you’re requirements are. You may need dedicated resources, or tightened security, maybe you need special software’s, or you need to find something more affordable. Many variables come into play.

However, doing your research, and knowing what you need rather than what you want – You can not only have your cake, but you can eat it to!

While both shared hosting and VPS hosting can do what is needed to get your site running, The differences between them are vast

With one, you only get a small slice of cake, while on the other hand you can have the entire thing to your self. Before we go into what gives these two approaches their distinct flavor, let’s clarify what goes into each one.

Shared Hosting and VPS Hosting Basics

With shared hosting, your site shares a server with many other sites. It’s like an apartment building: you get a unit in a larger structure. This option tends to be the cheapest because suppliers can serve many customers from one machine. Shared servers offer customers less bandwidth, management flexibility, and performance, but hosts handle all technical, maintenance and security configurations.

One step ahead of shared servers is VPS hosting, which offers more space to grow and fewer restrictions. This online real estate version is more like a digital condominium: more space to call home where you can host your website or application on a virtual server assigned exclusively to you.

It will continue to share the physical server with some others, but the resources are divided and dedicated to each user. Since you don’t have to compete for computing power, there is less concern that other websites use too much bandwidth or storage and slow down your site. These plans tend to be more expensive than shared hosting, but they are still quite reasonable.

Potential clients should check the reviews for more information about the shared hosting and VPS services we offer. Both options have their advantages and disadvantages. Let’s take a closer look at what that implies.

Difference No. 1: Performance

No matter how aesthetically pleasing or useful your website, the ability to access it quickly matters.

Web-users expect sites to load in two seconds, according to a Kissmetrics study, and visitors can leave a site if it takes more than three seconds; It is not much time to waste. The survey also found that 79 percent of online shoppers will not return to a website if they experienced performance problems while using it.

Choosing the right hosting package is a serious business decision when you consider that only milliseconds can determine whether people will do business with you.

A VPS hosting plan will almost always be faster than a shared hosting plan simply because its users do not have to queue with visitors from other sites to access theirs.

To illustrate the difference, imagine a carnival with different food vendors; If everyone had to be on the same line to reach each different provider, the line would take much longer than if each food stand had its own line.

VPS hosting offers more computing resources and processing power, which will increase the speed of most sites and, therefore, make consumers more likely to convert. If your site is relatively small, a shared hosting plan will probably work perfectly well. However, if your site is larger or used for business and revenue growth, you will probably notice the difference.

Difference No. 2: Reliability and Stability

When we talk about the availability of a web host, we do not check their calendar or the status of their relationship. Instead, we look at how often you can expect your website to work properly and how often it may not load due to server or network issues.

This is directly related to the availability of a server or the frequency with which the server is operational. Availability is indicated as a percentage and, as a general rule, anything greater than 99.9% is considered excellent.

Availability is essential for any website because it determines whether your online presence will be available and open to visitors when they first appear, which is particularly critical for professional portfolios, commercial sites, and e-commerce stores.

Problems can occur with servers hosting shared hosting plans and VPS. Much of this depends on the quality of the server hardware and software, as well as its expertise, support, and vendor management practices. However, you can usually expect fewer problems with a VPS plan because there are fewer clients on each server. Each partition can be configured and customized to the most effective settings for a website or application requirements, and the extra attention means that each VPS is generally safer and more stable.

In a shared hosting environment, many websites can potentially overload the server. A VPS resides in an independent hosting environment. Therefore, you are not afraid that other accounts may affect access to your site.

Think of a wall: if each brick is solid and secure, the wall is strong and fortified. If bricks are crumbling or missing, the whole structure is in jeopardy. Shared hosting servers contain hundreds of additional bricks.

Difference No. 3: Security

In a shared hosting environment, the risk of security breach is usually higher simply because there are more sites – and more websites mean more opportunities for attackers. In addition, shared hosting clients are generally the least familiar with the precautions for web hosting, which means that server vulnerabilities could be caused by your hosting neighbors.

When a client sharing the server forgets to update WordPress or becomes compromised, this can impact other sites on the same computer. However, just like performance and reliability, the actual security risks can vary considerably depending on the hosting company’s investments in the security of their servers.

The Core Hosting, for example, offers Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates on all domains it hosts, which means that the data transmitted through each site is always securely encrypted.

The choice of VPS hosting can be beneficial for websites dealing with a lot of user data or payment information. This option offers robust security features, typically managed by seasoned professionals. So you have less to worry about securing sensitive information.

You can think about the differences in security levels by considering what would be the purchase of home security. The basic options are provided with some sensors and signs that dissuade people from getting into it. More sophisticated options, however, include cameras and other surveillance devices that provide additional protection – it’s more like a VPS hosting environment.

Difference No. 4: Price

In general, you can expect to pay more for VPS hosting than for shared hosting simply because the cost of shared hosting is divided among the many users of the shared server. VPS hosting provides more resources and tends to be more reliable, so it often costs more.

Ideally, you will find the optimal point between what you are willing to pay and the features you should have.

From the point of view of prices, shared accommodation is usually the cheapest option. In The Core Hosting, shared hosting plans vary from $ 3.99 to $ 9.99 per month, depending on the features and billing cycle you choose.

VPS hosting packages include more premium features, such as increased performance and customization for online business. The Core Hosting’s VPS hosting plans start at $ 13 to $ 110 a month, offering a range of four options with different storage and RAM allocations. Determine your ideal price and the features you need to determine the level of service required by your website.

Difference No. 5: Managed Services

So far, we’ve talked about what are shared servers and virtual private servers, but we have not yet specified who manages them. Most of the time, shared servers are managed, which means that expert employees of the hosting provider will ensure that the servers are up-to-date and secure. Using a relatively vague definition of managed services, shared hosting technicians help you with tasks such as migrations, backups, monitoring, updates, and maintenance.

A VPS can be managed or not, and the latter refers to a service in which the company only helps with problems with its server or network: the client is responsible for installing and maintaining software installations and configurations, for example.

To be clear, however, managed shared servers and managed virtual servers are not created equal.

When you select a VPS host, you can expect to see more features and more support when you opt for a managed plan. Whether you choose managed or unmanaged, VPS depends on the time you want to invest to maintain the reliability and performance of your site as well as your technical capabilities to do so.

At The Core Hosting, we offer managed VPS, so you can be assured that you will get high-quality assistance from the 24/7 technical support team to diagnose and resolve performance and security issues.

Difference No. 6: Scalability

Scalability is the ability of a hosting account to adjust to the growth of your website. This is often a decisive feature for choosing between shared hosting or VPS hosting. Scalability has many aspects, including storage and server capabilities.

If you have an average of 10,000 visitors per month, a shared host can support that level of use. However, as your website expands and grows, a shared hosting plan may not be able to keep up. Although shared servers have limited capacity to support a greater workload, VPS hosting plans have relatively unlimited potential in this area.

Resources can often be adjusted to accommodate various traffic trends; For example, e-commerce stores will probably need more bandwidth to handle buyers’ fever on Black Friday. If you expect to add much more content and traffic, a VPS hosting plan is usually a good investment.

Some website owners opt for an affordable shared hosting plan initially to try an idea and then switch to a VPS plan later. However, if you anticipate rapid growth, you may want to consider starting with a VPS host. When user demand begins to exceed server resources, there is no other option but to update your plan.

Difference No. 7: Customization

Sometimes, you may want to have more control over the software you can install to optimize the performance of your website. With a virtual private server, you generally have fewer restrictions on what you can and cannot do in terms of customizing and installing applications on the server. You will not have the same authorization on a shared server.

Remember, with great power comes great responsibility. Although the potential for software configuration is unlimited, it should not be exceeded and accidentally destroy or delete files or programs. Make only the necessary changes for your site.

So Which Option is Best for You?

Do you remember that the cake failed at the beginning of this article? Running out of ice resulted in a birthday cake that would make Hagrid even shout “Pinterest fails!”

Choosing the wrong type of server can result in a similar lack of resources.

This can take the form of storage space if you have a large site, scalability if you want more space, or save money if you need a hosting plan less expensive. Whatever the needs of your website and your business, your decision-making process should be at the center of your concerns when you consider shared hosting or VPS hosting as an ingredient in your recipe for the success of your hosting.

New Shared hosting features

Shared hosting is one of our largest services we provide, and we are always looking for ways to improve the performance of our servers, which of course improves your sites. Over the last few months, our team has researched, tested, and now finally rolled out several new features to this platform.

• Redis Server – For all of our Deluxe and Premium Shared hosting packages, you now have the ability to create, manage, and control your own redis instance. With Redis, you can vastly improve the performance of your websites by allowing you to utilize it as a caching system, rather than file-based or Memcache based.
• PHP 7.3 – We’ve added support for PHP 7.3 so you can now use this newer version which is 10% faster than 7.2, 30% faster than 7.0-7.1, and 3x faster than 5.6.
• Discontinuation of PHP 5.6 and 7.0 – Unfortunately, due to both of these versions now falling into their EOL (End of Life), which means they are no longer provided any type of updates. We will be removing these versions from our shared hosting platform. If you need help migrating to a newer version of PHP, please feel free to contact our support team.
• Cloudflare Railgun – We are proud to announce that we have rolled out our Cloudflare railgun to all shared hosting packages. From your Cpanel account, you can now add your site to Cloudflare, and utilize not only its super-fast CDN, but our included railgun network, built on the Cloudflare platform. (Best part, it’s free)
• JetBackups System – We’ve upgraded our backup system to now include the Feature package JetBackup system. You can now have more control over your backups, restorations, and more.

Lower Dedicated Server prices!

Over the years, we have become great partners with our infrastructure provider, and as such, we are now able to provide our Semi-Managed dedicated servers at an even lower price than before. On some server packages, the price has been lowered by almost half, while still maintaining the fully packed hardware and unlimited bandwidth at high speeds.

If you are looking to make the switch from your VPS service or shared hosting, to a Dedicated Server, contact our sales team today. We can help you make the best decision for what your site or application needs, and what will help you grow.

cPanel price changes

As most of us heard back in June, cPanel was acquired by Oakley Capital, and as such, price changes were going to be in the works. Expanding a bit more on our email last month in august, cpanel price changes went into effect September 1st of this year. These changes go from the standard VPS or Bare metal license to a new “Per-account” system. Depending on the number of individual cPanel accounts you have within your system, it will determine the pricing of your license. Below is a simple chart of the # of accounts Vs the price.

For VPS’s (Cloud)

BareMetal Servers (Dedicated Servers)

If you have any questions regarding the new cpanel pricing structure, or what your new price will be, or even how to lower your cpanel license price. Please contact our support team with all the questions, we will be happy to assist you.