Best Practices to Maintain Website Performance

In the present digital world, websites are like valuable assets for all the online businesses. Online shopping has already made many businesses go online. However, the website's performance and availability plays a key role in retaining the customers and making them loyal. It also helps the businesses to stay potentially competent in their respective fields.

Of many other factors that affect a website's availability, website downtime is the major concern that makes the site unavailable for the users. The availability of the website 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 website 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 website performance.

Following are few ways which could help you in improving your website's performance and uptime.

Better optimization: Optimizing the website improves the speed and performance of web pages. The static content in the website 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 the 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 number of users are searching for the same content in the website. 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 website.

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 website more reliable. Though the programming standards of HTML5 do not ensure that the website 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 the websites look more appealing to the users. Many things like images, scripts, style sheets are included in the websites to make them look better. This makes the first time visitors to make more HTTP requests to view the subsequent files. Implementing expire headers to the static components of the website eliminates the need of 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 making the customers to have a better user experience.

Opt for a reliable monitoring service: Practicing the best ways that ensure website performance will become less effective if the website lacks perpetual supervision. Apart from alerting on the downtime of the site, website 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.