Best Practices To Maintain Website Performance

By Author: Nate Rodney
Total Articles: 499
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In the present digital world, web sites are like valuable assets for all online businesses. Online shopping has already made many businesses go online. However, the web site's performance and availability plays a key role in retaining customers and making them loyal. It also helps businesses to stay competitive in their respective fields.
Of many other factors that affect a web site's availability, web site downtime is the major concern that makes the site unavailable for users. The availability of the web site without any downtime is measured in terms of uptime. So, the higher the uptime rating of your site the better will be its availability. On the other hand, poor web site performance results in lower search engine rankings, poor user experience and hence creates a loss to the business. So, in order to avoid all such things, every business needs to adopt best practices that ensure good web site performance.
Following are a few ways which could help you in improving your web site's performance and uptime.
Better optimization: Optimizing the web site improves the speed and performance of web pages. The static ...
... content in the web site can be optimized by compressing the images to the best possible dimensions, while retaining the high quality characteristics. At the same time, it is equally important to make sure that the web server has the ability to deliver the compressed content. Website optimization is frequently required by sites that are shared on web hosting servers and also for larger sites that receive more traffic.
Better caching of content: Cache content is another technique which enables the site to scale up more easily when more users are searching for the same content in the web site. Cache content holds the most popular content in a cached storage allocation on the server and hence enables easy and fast access to the data even during traffic spikes. This technique is more applicable to the content that changes quite often such as popular articles, best readings, latest articles, etc.
Optimize your CMS: Optimization of the Content Management System (CMS) also impacts the availability of web pages to the users. The CMS optimization can be done by reducing the number of database calls that are required for each page request. This reduction in the number of times the information is sent helps in maintaining better connections. That is, the lower the number of database calls, the faster the users can access the content on the web site.
Use HTML5 to make the site more reliable: HTML 5 is one of the best versions of markup languages to structure and present the content of the site for the Internet. It was specially designed with built-in standards that can make the web site more reliable. Though the programming standards of HTML5 do not ensure that the web site won't go down, the special mechanisms used in the code will assist during such circumstances. Moreover, they are efficient in handling any kind of unanticipated traffic spikes.
Add expire headers to the content: Web designing plays a vital role in making web sites look more appealing to the users. Many things like images, scripts and style sheets are included in the web sites to make them look better. This causes first time visitors to make more HTTP requests to view the subsequent files. Implementing expire headers to the static components of the web site eliminates the need for several HTTP requests and makes the web pages load faster. Expire headers make the components cacheable, and this reduces the size and number of HTTP requests which gives customers a better user experience.
Opt for a reliable monitoring service: Practicing the best ways that ensure web site performance will become less effective if the web site lacks perpetual supervision. Apart from alerting on the downtime of the site, web site monitoring services also help you know the performance of your site. This helps you to respond quickly and fix the issue before it impacts the reputation of your business.

Alertra is a leading provider of web site monitoring and alerting services. We monitor the availability and performance of Internet-connected devices. As part of our site monitoring service, we provide timely alert notifications and access to detailed reporting. We offer monitoring service to all sizes of businesses right from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.