Is your website running slow? Optimize your VPS Performance

The COVID-19 global pandemic has brought a few change in the latest security trends. According to research conducted by Akamai, the core targets of cyber-attacks are retail, hospitality, and travel sectors, but the corporate marketing systems or even web hosting companies are not completely safe from being targeted by assailants.

These security threats might also spill over to 2021, and it’s much significant than ever to know how to protect your website against these attacks. You can patch some security loopholes using strong attack prevention software, such as firewalls, Virtual Private Networks (VPN), and robust authentication. Yet, some attacks exploit human errors or misinformation, which is catching wind thanks to many people working away from the office.

As you are aware of the fact that slow websites lead to a loss of visitors, preventing you from converting those visitors to paying customers. Studies done by Akamai prove that more and more consumers expect quick-loading sites – a recent study shows that 30% of all consumers expect page load times of one second or less. What’s the primary consequence of slow load times? Loss of revenue – Akamai estimates that over 3 billion dollars of revenue are lost due to slow checkout pages. Imagine your WooCommerce shop was to experience such a lag. What would be the effects on your bottom line?

To rectify the speed issue one option is to upgrade your hosting plan to VPS or dedicated server hosting and VPS hosting price in India is quite affordable. However, one way to enhance the performance of your server, speed up your website, and prevent any loss of visitors is to implement caching. Caching helps in speeding up your site and reduces latency through provisional storage of frequently-accessed data. Repeatedly requesting files is slow and expensive in terms of resources. When that data is cached, end users can access it much more quickly. There are many different methods of caching available, including third-party plugins, server-side caching, and in-browser caching.

1. Server Caching

Caching software is very effective at keeping your site loading super-fast when high traffic hits. Installing and using caching within your server can be complex, but our Hosting support team is experienced in setting up such software and making the process simple. We recommend a few different options for caching software, including:

• Varnish: a proxy and cache that improves the performance of busy, dynamic websites
• Memcached / Memcached with PHP: a distributed, high-performance in-memory caching system used to speed up sites that use databases
• Squid: a caching and forwarding web proxy. 

1. Caching Plugins (For WordPress Sites)

Third-party caching plugins are easy to implement for customers with WordPress Hosting, but there are quite a few of them on the market. Our recommended plugins include WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, and WP-FFPC –In addition to caching, these plugins often offer a wide range of additional features to speed up your site by compressing data and moving it closer to your customers. Such features include:

• GZIP Compression: GZIP Compression remembers previously transferred content and works to find and replace any duplicates more efficiently. This process works best on text-based content.
• Minification: Minification compresses your content by removing all unnecessary information from the source code without changing its functionality. Many WordPress caching plugins offer minification for CSS, HTML, and Javascript.
• CDNs: A CDN doesn’t speed up your server so much as physically moves your content closer to your customers using a large distribution of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the world. So why is a content delivery network helpful integrated into a caching plugin? After speeding up your site with a caching plugin, you can use a CDN to decrease latency even further.

1. Browser Caching

In-browser caching reduces server load and speeds up a website by reducing the number of requests per page. For mostly-static files within your website, you can set the correct file headers and instruct the browser to cache them. Those files will then stay on the user’s browser after they have been requested from the server once already. The browser will simply check to see if the cached files have changed instead of requesting them new every time.

Each caching method has its benefits, but often it’s a combination of more than one method that is most effective at speeding up your server. Our Support team is available 24/7/365 to answer any questions about which caching options and cheap VPS hosting India plans are best for you!