Boosting Your Website’s Speed on Shared Hosting: Best Practices
Website performance is dependent on the speed that it delivers to the visitors. However, by choosing the basic shared web hosting plans, many of you think there will be no downtime or latency rate. The faster your website loads, the more users will stay, engage, and even convert into sales. A slow website leads to the visitor’s loss.
Optimizing your website’s speed on shared hosting is not to be complicated. Simple caching adjustments, choosing cheap NVMe hosting with content delivery, and resource management make a crucial difference. In this blog, we will be covering the best practices for a smooth website speed on the shared hosting server.
How to Increase the Website Speed on Shared Hosting Servers?
1. Optimize Images and Media Files
High-resolution images, videos, and other multimedia content can drastically slow down the website. By optimizing the files, you can reduce their size without compromising quality. There are different image compression tools like TinyPNG or JPEG optimizer to decrease image file sizes. You can also implement lazy loading, which delays the loading of images and videos until they’re visible to the user, reducing the initial page load time.
Furthermore, choosing appropriate image formats can make a difference. For instance, WebP format is more lightweight compared to JPEG or PNG, while retaining quality, and is supported by most browsers.
2. Enable Browser Caching
Browser caching allows the static website files to be stored on the user’s device. By doing so, users get the search results instantly and browsers do not have to reload the elements. Hence, it results in faster load times. You can enable browser caching by adding an expiration date to your headers, which will tell browsers how long they should keep certain files.
You can achieve this by editing your website’s .htaccess file. For WordPress users, caching plugins like W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache offer browser caching as a feature, making it simpler to set up without requiring coding knowledge.
3. Use Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
A CDN keeps cached copies of your site’s static files on different servers all around the world. That way, when a visitor gets to your site, they are served by the closest server to that particular location, which can hugely improve load times. Leading providers of CDNs are Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, and Akamai, all of whom support shared hosting.
CDN reduces the load on a shared hosting server because they get to deal with part of your traffic for you, making it faster and improving not just speed but your reliability during your peak traffic time for your site.
4. Minimize HTTP Requests
Every element on your page – images, stylesheets, scripts – has an HTTP request. The more requests, the longer it takes for your page to load. You can cut down on requests by fewer elements on each page, or by combining CSS files and applying inline styles to smaller items.
Use sprites in CSS. This will allow you to put several images into a single file, so for many icons or pictures, one HTTP request may be enough to load multiple images instead of having so many requests for loading separate images. It reduces the overall load time and improves page speed in shared hosting services.
5. Monitor Website Performance Regularly
Monitor your website’s performance regularly to identify and fix any issues that could slow down its performance. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom provide detailed reports and feedback on enhancement. By running these checks periodically, you can address problems as they arise, keeping your site optimized.
Regular monitoring also allows you to see the impact of each optimization effort, helping you fine-tune your approach to achieve optimal performance.
Conclusion
No matter which web hosting plan you prefer, ensuring a positive user experience is crucial for enhancing SEO. While shared web hosting comes with limitations due to resource sharing, implement these best practices and you can achieve a noticeable boost in the website speed. By leveraging CDN technology and file optimization, you get a faster website.
For those looking for an even more robust hosting solution, MilesWeb offers shared hosting plans with built-in speed optimizations like SSD storage, CDN integration, and server-level caching. These features, combined with 24/7 support, make MilesWeb an ideal choice for website owners who want both speed and reliability. With MilesWeb, you can maintain high-speed performance without breaking the bank.
