Page load time has always been important. No one wants to surf a slow website.
It’s even more so important nowadays as the majority of people are surfing using their mobile devices without as much bandwidth.
When someone sees your link on Facebook and clicks over, if you’re not loading almost instantly it’s highly likely they’re going to click off and never return again.
However, this can be fixed with just a couple of simple optimizations:
1. Start by testing your website’s speed and see where you can make improvements.
2. If using Apache, make sure mod_deflate (or GZIP compression) is enabled. Most of the time this can be enabled by editing the .htaccess file in your root directory with the following:
<IfModule mod_mime.c> AddType application/x-javascript .js AddType text/css .css </IfModule> <IfModule mod_deflate.c> SetOutputFilter DEFLATE <IfModule mod_setenvif.c> SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:rar|zip)$ no-gzip dont-vary SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpg|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:avi|mov|mp4)$ no-gzip dont-vary SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.mp3$ no-gzip dont-vary </IfModule> <IfModule mod_setenvif.c> BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html </IfModule> <IfModule mod_headers.c> Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary </IfModule> </IfModule>
This will cause Apache to compress all CSS and javascript files by using mod_deflate.
3. Leverage browser caching in Apache. As with the edit above, add these lines to your .htaccess file:
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf|pdf|flv|mp3)$"> <IfModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive on ExpiresDefault "access plus 14 days" Header set Cache-Control "public" </IfModule> </FilesMatch> <FilesMatch "\.(html|htm|xml|txt|xsl)$"> Header set Cache-Control "max-age=7200, must-revalidate" </FilesMatch>
This will add far future expire headers to your static content (images, js, css, etc.).
4. Enable Cloudflare to leverage their CDN and other website optimizations. This comes pre-configured on all NameHero solutions, simply enable inside of cPanel:
5. Activate Cloudflare Railgun. A $200/month value, this is also included at no charge on all NameHero accounts. Railgun accelerates the connection between each CloudFlare data center and an origin server so that requests that cannot be served from the CloudFlare cache are nevertheless served very fast:
All of these optimizations can be implemented in under 30 minutes and can save you a lot of headache having your pages accessible to people around the globe no matter what device they’re on.
Our hardware is already made readily available in the cloud using high performance solid state drive storage with Raid 10 and a lot more RAM than the traditional web host. Feel free to reach out to our team for further advice on how to optimize your landing pages!
Ryan Gray is the founder and CEO of NameHero, one of the fastest growing independent web hosts in the United States. Ryan has been working online since 1998 and has over two-decades experience in Internet Entrepreneurship.
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