Quick and Easy Steps to Help You Maximize Your Website Uptime

Here at Alertra we frequently discuss the detriments of website downtime. We have discussed the important role that web hosting plays and the proactive measures you, as a website owner, should be putting into place to decrease the amount of downtime that your visitors experience. Today we are going to discuss some additional actions you can take to maximize the uptime of your website. These tips do not require you to change web hosts or create a secondary hosting account. They are simple measures that every webmaster should take to ensure that their site is optimized for increased uptime and the best performance possible.

Compress Your Website’s Data

One way you can optimize the content of your site is to compress your website’s data. There are PHP5 applications, such as Minify, that work with your CSS and JavaScript to compress your web data. This type of software can also place the JavaScript on your site’s pages at the end of the document whenever possible. While it may not seem like a big step, the amount of data that goes through your site can have a significant impact on your site’s uptime. By compressing the data, you can reduce the amount of data that your site actually uses and avoid downtime caused by too much data usage.

Reduce Your HTTP Requests

Another way to maximize your site’s uptime is to reduce the amount of HTTP requests that your website receives. You can do this by combining multiple CSS files into a single file. Combine JavaScripts into one file whenever possible as well. You should also include these files only on the pages where they are absolutely necessary. This will allow you to present your site to your visitors without the excessive use of HTTP requests to fetch your site.

Optimize Your Site’s Static Content

A key to improving uptime is to reduce the amount of data your site uses, as explained above. Another way you can reduce the amount of data that you are using is to optimize your site’s static content. This means compressing images. You want to compress your images into as small of a file size as possible without losing the quality of the images. Programs like Caesium can reduce the file size of your images by up to 90 percent without any effect on the image quality. This equates to less data being used when presenting the static content on your site.

Use a Faster Ethernet Connection

Most companies have their Web servers connected to the public Internet via Ethernet networks that are running at 10Gbit/sec. The truth is that speed might not cut it for high-traffic websites. Increased performance can dramatically help high-traffic websites in maintaining uptime by reducing the amount of downtime that occurs due to a network overload. You should look into connecting your Web server to the public Internet using Ethernet networks that run at 40GBit/sec; especially if you have a high-traffic site.

Aim for 100 Percent Uptime

While it’s technically impossible to achieve an uptime of 100 percent, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t aim for it. Your website represents your company’s image to the Internet world. Perfection isn’t expected, but it should be aimed for. If your site is going down more often than it should be, it’s not going to reflect well on your company’s image. This is why it’s crucial that you take all possible measures to optimize your site for increased uptime and performance. The above tips are simple steps that take only a bit of your time, yet they can have a significant impact on the performance and availability of your site.