In today’s competitive world, having a fast website with no downtime has become a basic necessity. Even if your website is down due to some genuine reason, you stand a chance of losing out on many prospective customers; therefore, it is extremely important to ensure good website uptime. Moreover, your website also signifies your brand and our business name online and if it is down quite frequently or if it works slowly during the peak times, it will have an adverse effect on your brand name.
You can improve your website’s uptime with the best practices mentioned below, they are easy to follow and they will guarantee results:
The Perfect Web Hosting Platform
The most basic aspect of your website is the web hosting plan it is hosted on. If you encounter frequent downtimes to your website, have a look at your web hosting plan and check if it is providing your website with the necessary resources. Maybe you need to upgrade your web hosting plan or you need to change it. Initially, you can consider hosting on a shared hosting package but as the traffic to your website grows and if you notice that your website is working slowly due to all the activity on it, then you might want to opt for a VPS or a dedicated server for faster website performance.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting or the pay-per-use hosting solution is great for small, mid-size and big businesses. If you host your website on the public cloud, you will benefit from a great user-friendly and intuitive interface that will let you scale your website up or down whenever required. Hosting on cloud platform is a great way to ensure that your website or application is getting the required amount of resources and you save money by paying for the actual consumption of the resources.
Reduce The Size Of Images
It is important to optimize the front-end of your website for ensuring a better performance and a great user experience. Everyone likes to add images to the website, but they take up a lot of space and resources making your website slow. You can speed up your website and decrease the instances of downtimes by optimizing the images on your website. The HTTP Archive states that about 61% of a website’s page weight is made up of images. Make sure that you are using the appropriate size of images and you can also adopt new image formats like WebP or JPegXR for reducing the image weight without compromising on image quality.
Improve DNS
The DNS or the Domain Name Server is an important attribute and you might not consider it while ensuring your website’s uptime; however it matters. DNS propagation is the first step in the process when the visitor accesses your website. If the DNS service is down, it means your website is also down. You can upgrade your DNS services and enable it with automatic failover to the other servers in the network and therefore even if the closest server goes down, your website won’t be affected.
Use A CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A content deliver network works great when it comes to tracking the static files of your website like images, CSS and Java scripts. A CDN then delivers these files through the web servers closer to the user’s location. Shorter proximity ensures faster website loading time and better website performance.
Compress The Java Scripts
Compressing the Java script files will remove the extra spaces, reduce the file size and ultimately, it will improve the loading time of your website. Another trick is to load the third party Java scripts asynchronously. Today, every website comprises of third party content like social media, live chat, commenting, information feeds etc. Therefore, if the Java scripts are loaded asynchronously, then in the event of any third-party crashes, your website page won’t be held up.
Beef Up Website Security
Data breaches and hacking attempts have increased and it is extremely crucial to safeguard your website against them. Talk to your web hosting company about security benefits offered. If you are using a content management system, you can take a precautionary step for safeguarding your website by updating your CMS regularly. Also, make sure to use strong passwords and keep changing them frequently. You must also check our website file permissions if they are rightly defined, otherwise they might give easy access to the hackers. The web hosting plan and the web hosting company you choose also play an important role in protecting your website against the DDoS attacks.
Enable Website Caching
Website caching is a great technology that makes the website faster and leads to supreme website uptime and great user satisfaction. Websites are accessed several times in a month. Usually, everytime a browser requests a web page; the server has to perform some complex and time consuming calculations. These calculations are about retrieving your latest updates, generating headers and footers, finding your website’s sidebar widgets etc. and at most of the times, the result of all these calculations is the same. Through website caching, you can make the server remember the final result and therefore there is no need to perform any complex calculations and the web page can be served quickly. If you update your website regularly or add new posts, you don’t have to worry about serving the latest content to your viewers as you can define specific conditions in your caching system where it empties the cached files and regenerates the new ones according to your specifications. Website caching makes your website faster and eliminates the possibilities of downtime.
Conclusion
It is important to do what you can to ensure your website uptime. Apart from implementing the best practices mentioned above, you can also use online tools for monitoring your website performance. Uptime is an important component of your website performance and it also signifies that you have an efficient and a sturdy website that can provide the best user experience at any given time.
