How Do I Make My Site Faster?

It’s the concern of every developer. How do I speed up my site? Like cars, fast is never fast enough. Of course you can get super-fast SSD hosting from A2 Hosting. But there’s always more to be done. We’re with you. We are always looking to speed up the performance of our own internal applications, and looking for ways to optimize our servers for the benefit of our customers. Here’s a few things to consider when looking into your own site.

Choose your software carefully. The software package you base your site around is the factor that has the biggest impact on your site’s performance. Some software is more resource intensive than others, and some scales better than others. Knowing the requirements of the site, what package will perform best under those conditions? Do you have a complicated site with significant database needs, requiring multiple indices on several colums among dozens of tables? Or do you have a simple blog with short articles free of complex templates? Starting with an appropriate, and a solid baseline will avoid putting you in a postion where you’re doing optimizations just to get an acceptable level of performance.

Don’t over complicate things. When implementing your site, always strive for the simplest implementation possible. When designing a template, avoid breaking it up into sub templates that are then pulled together unless it’s likely those sub templates are going to be re-used elsewhere, and that re-use will have significant benefits towards managing the site. Rendering a single template is always going to be faster than rendering six or a dozen. Likewise on the database side, keep it lean and simple whenever possible. Especially when it comes to tables that are going to have frequent lookups and massive joins performed on them, keeping the table as lean as possible will keep those operations from bogging down.

Use a Content Distribution Network. We make setting up CloudFlare easy for our customers. Using a CDN can help immensely with many sites, serving static content from servers located closer to your site’s users. It will also help protect against massive spikes in traffic as well as some types of attacks.

Ultimately you may find that your traffic or resource usage is just too demanding for the type of hosting you currently have. In many cases this is a good problem to have. If so, we have many higher end packages, one of which is sure to fit your needs.