Web Hosting Guide: Ten Ways to Improve Website Performance

In today’s digital world, website speed is extremely important. With people’s attention spans shortening, we only have seconds to engage our visitors. Slow loading times can reduce satisfaction and hurt conversions in sales or email signups.

What causes most websites to slow down? Over 60% of websites slow down due to the hosting plan they choose. Other speed killers include missing content delivery networks, too much code, too large images, and a bad cache setup.

But where do you start optimizing? The hosting setup you choose lays the foundation. Choosing the right web host and maximizing your site speed performance provides a smooth, fast visitor experience.

This guide will explore 10 key ways to maximize your web hosting performance. Let’s take a look!

1. Choose the Right Hosting Plan

Not all hosting plans are created equal. More money does not guarantee better performance.

Dedicated hosting: A separate physical server dedicated to your site. Offers maximum speed and control, but costs more.

VPS Hosting: A virtual slice of a server. Flexible, scalable, and affordable to most.

Shared hosting: Multiple sites on one server. Cheapest but limited resources may slow things down.

Cloud hosting: Resources are distributed across servers that can be easily scaled. But check the specifications like location etc.

2. Leverage a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CDN has global edge servers that can cache and serve content faster by shortening the physical distance to the user. This can speed up and handle traffic surges.

Most hosts offer affordable CDN integration. Plugins like WP Rocket and Swift simplify optimization.

3. Choose the place closest to your visitors

The physical distance between a hosting company’s data center and your website visitors can significantly affect website speed. Just a few hundred miles of extra distance can mean a few seconds slower load times.

If possible, choose a web host that is located on the same continent, or as close as possible to where most of your visitors live and access your website. Check your website analytics to pinpoint the main locations your users are coming from.

4. Configure dynamic content caching

Basic caching stores static copies of pages to display those pages instead of completely creating the page from scratch on each visit. This saves computer resources and makes loading faster.

But many websites today rely on constantly changing content, such as:

• Custom WordPress Themes
• User Account Information
• Interactive Tools
• Personalized content
• Filter and sort options
• Comment Stream

Simply caching a static copy will not speed up most visits to such sites. Dynamic caching goes one step further by caching:

• Database search
• API Calls
• Page Templates
• Page Sections
• Full page version for logged in and non-logged in visitors

This works well for live sites like:

• Online Store
• Portal
• forum
• Table of contents
• Custom Business Website

How to set up dynamic caching:

• Control Panel Settings
• WPFastestCache and other plug-ins
• CDNs like Cloudflare
• Custom code tuning

With the right configuration, dynamic sites can match or even surpass the speed of static sites thanks to dynamic caching. Optimized specifically for the platform for the best results!

5. Simplify website code

Bulky code forces the browser to wade through extra junk, slowing things down. Developers are required to:

• Minify HTML, CSS and JS by removing extraneous symbols
• Remove unused code blocks
• Reduce image file size
• Improve caching rules
• Limit redirects, as this forces an extra step
• Even small code improvements can significantly speed up your site.

6. Choose a fast database hosting option

Every site interaction involves a database lookup, such as loading a page, processing submissions, managing cache, etc. Slow database hosting hinders all of these operations.

Many shared hosts use shared MySQL databases, which are prone to poor performance when overcrowded. Upgrade to a better option like a cloud database service (Amazon RDS) for faster, more reliable database hosting.

7. Analyze site performance regularly

Don’t just set it and forget it! Analyze performance at least monthly using tools like:

Pingdom: Overall page loading speed test.

GTmetrix: Page speed and performance metrics.

Google PageSpeed: Page optimization suggestions.

Monitor speed over time to identify emerging problems early. Audit after rolling out new features or experiencing a surge in traffic.

8. Limit the use of large media files

Images, videos, and other media add tremendous engagement, but slow things down.

Optimize usage without affecting experience:

• Lazy loading of large images not immediately visible
• Replace JPG format with WebP
• Compressing Large Files with TinyPNG
• Host media on a CDN to spread the workload

9. Upgrade to faster server hardware

In times of high traffic, server specs become critical. Shared servers can be bogged down with only 2-4 cores and limited RAM.

On a VPS or dedicated plan, upgrade to powerful hardware such as:

8~12 CPU cores: More cores can handle more concurrent site visitors

24~48+GB RAM: supports extended memory cache

NVMe SSD drives: Lightning-fast solid-state storage access

10. Choose a reliable web host

Even the best optimizations can fail if there are problems with the underlying hosting infrastructure. This can cause lags, downtime, and other issues.

Thoroughly reviewed hosts:

Uptime: Look for a 99.9% uptime guarantee

Support: 24/7 options show stronger commitment

Review: Real-life experience checking reliability

Don’t sacrifice uptime, security, and support just for speed.

Summarize

Optimizing hosting speed may seem tricky, but start with the right plan and host. Then continually monitor and implement caching, CDN, upgraded hardware, efficient encoding, and more.

These efforts paid off with faster response times, more room for visitors, higher conversion rates, and greater ROI.