Website Owners' New Year's Resolutions: Improve Performance and Minimize Downtime

With 2015 quickly approaching, it is about that time of year when we all start to make New Year's resolutions. If you own an ecommerce site, this year you should be making a resolution to minimize website downtime and increase your site's performance. Here are some tips to help you stick to this resolution.

Implement a Website Monitoring Service

If you are among the few businesses who still do not utilize a website monitoring service to ensure the uptime of your website, now is the time to do it. By implementing website monitoring now, as you go into 2015 you can do so with the assurance that you will be notified of website downtime the minute it happens and not a moment later. The only way to truly minimize downtime is to get on top of it when it does occur, and that means having quality website monitoring service in place.

Use Sprites to Optimize Images

Your website's performance is just as crucial to your success as its uptime is. Studies have shown that consumers will leave a site if the page they are on takes more than three seconds to load. When it comes to pages that load slowly, images that have not been properly optimized are often the culprit. By utilizing sprites you can reduce the number of HTTP requests, which is one of the leading ways to get your site to load more quickly.

Reduce File Requests to the Server

As mentioned, reducing the number of file requests to your server will significantly decrease the time it takes for a page on your site to load. To do this, you need to optimize your site properly. That means using separate files for Cascading Style Sheets and Javascript, combining script files and CSS files, avoiding duplicate scripts, place scripts at the bottom of your page if they are not included in a separate file, please style sheets at the top of your page if they are not included in a separate file, and avoid page redirects to another URL.

Put a Failsafe Plan into Place

At some point in 2015, your site will go down due to an issue with your hosting provider or DNS host. Downtime is one of those unfortunate inevitabilities. What you can control, however, is what happens if your site goes down due to an issue with your hosting provider. Put backup DNS and backup hosting into place to ensure that you have a quick way to redirect customers to a fully functional site if your primary site goes down.

By utilizing the above tips and techniques, you can be sure that you minimize the downtime of your website for the up and coming year and maximize your site's performance and profitability.