Experiencing serious growth with your website? Then you have to start considering your hosting options. When not managed properly, growth can kill your website because your web host simply does not have the resources to handle the requirements.
Usually, the choice is obvious - upgrade to a bigger plan such as a VPS hosting plan or a dedicated plan. Unfortunately, an upgrade also implies that you have to fork more money to pay the monthly hosting fees. Here are some tips on how to optimize your high traffic site so that you can continue to host your site on a budget hosting account.
Tip 1: Write simple code. Don't use complicated codes that take a long time to load. Sometimes, a single web page can dampen the performance of the entire website. Code can take up server resources and cause the entire site to perform poorly. So take the time to write good, clean and simple code and your site will run a lot faster.
Tip 2: Use third party tracking for stats. Third party tracking requires you to install code on your own site. But when the code runs, it's actually loading scripts from a third party server. This means the code is not using the resources of your own server to execute. When you can free up server resources, your server tends to run a lot faster.
Tip 3: Update your scripts regularly. Open source scripts like WordPress need to be updated frequently to ensure maximum performance. When there is an update, bugs are fixed and/or removed, leading to faster performance.
Tip 4: Remove all unnecessary plugins. Many open source scripts allow you to install and run third party plugins. These plugins may be useful but don't overdo it! Un-used plugins can put an unnecessary load on your server. If you don't need them, just remove them!
Tip 5: Optimize your database. Your database can easily grow very big on a high traffic site. Be sure to optimize the database on a regular basis so that the queries load faster. Your admin panel should provide the tools for you to do this.
Tip 6: Beware of advanced features. Many software boast of having advanced features such as caching for faster loading. Sometimes, these features take up additional server resources. When that happens, the server actually becomes slower rather than faster. Remember that simplicity is the key to having a fast loading site. Do away with all the bells and whistles.
Of course, there is only so much you can do to optimize your site to let it run faster. Eventually, growth may outstrip all the advantages you have gained from your optimization efforts. When that happens, you know that it is time to go for an upgrade.
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