Chris Allen

Website Performance & Optimisation

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Website Performance & Optimisation

We all know that currently, a good website is key to online success. Your website’s performance and how well it ticks those SEO boxes can greatly increase traffic flow and engagements.

 

Website Optimisation

Website optimisation is about making your website work as efficiently as possible. This could be about having neat, efficient code or compressing images/video into the right format to reduce file sizes.

But why should you care about this?

Well the more optimised your website is, the faster it will work and load pages. This is key nowadays as the average person online expects a website to load in only 2 seconds! (We’ve got a blog on that if you want to know more). Furthermore, faster websites generally attract more traffic and convert more too.

47% of customers expect a website to load in 2 seconds graphic

How do you measure this?

There are plenty of tools available to check your website’s optimisation.

We’ve found Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to be very effective – with a bonus that it’s completely free! All you need to do is enter your website address and it’ll do all the rest.

Aiming for ‘100’

Google’s PageSpeed Insights gives your website a score out of 100 for both mobile and desktop optimisation. Having a site be ‘100’ is the goal for everyone, however, it’s not the be-all and end-all for having a fast website…

 

 

Website Performance

Website Performance is a general term used for how ‘good’ a website is. Typically, this is based on the speed and responsiveness of your website. And while optimisation can make a difference to your site’s speed, you don’t necessarily have to have an optimised site for it to be fast.

 

A different kind of speed

As you may know, websites need to be ‘hosted’ on a platform of some kind to run.

This could be shared hosting, a private server or many other options. Each of these have they’re own pros and cons, with varying costs and performance. So why is this relevant? The platform your website is hosted on can make a dramatic difference to how fast your website loads.

You could have a very poorly optimised site score but still, have a lightning-fast website. This is because the infrastructure powering your site pulls up some of the slack.

How can you measure this?

There are various ways of measuring this speed. We particularly like GTMetrix. This one is free so that’s another bonus.

If you pay someone for hosting, they should be able to give you detailed reports of your site’s current performance. We do this with the Hosting we provide, which is how we get detailed reports. Like with the ones you can see when we made our site 10x Faster!

If nothing else, it’s reassuring to see how your site is performing – especially if you have a lower Google page score.

WordPress speed improvement graph
Our Website Performance Report

 

Which Is Better?

Unfortunately, there is no clear-cut answer to that one.

In an ideal world, you would have both be as best they can be. However, that would be both expensive and time-consuming. Here is a quick pros/cons summary of both.

Web Optimisation

Pros:

  • Boosts SEO ranking
  • Google ‘likes’ a high Google score
  • Looks good to customers if they check it
  • Improve speed

Cons:

  • Could be a long list of fixes
  • Fixes can be time-consuming & require regular maintenance
  • Can be expensive if you pay a web developer

 

Web Performance (Hosting)

Pros:

  • The immediate impact on site speed
  • Can make a significant difference
  • Simple if you’re buying hosting

Cons:

  • Must pay a monthly fee
  • Performance can vary depending on the amount spent (depends on provider)
  • Doesn’t improve Google score so can make your site look worse than it is

 

Our Recommendation

If you want our honest opinion, the easiest way to improve website speeds is to improve your website hosting.

It’s often inexpensive for smaller websites and whoever you sign up with should sort out the technical details needed to move your site. Easy.

If you’re looking for a faster WordPress site, you can find out a bit more on our Fast WordPress Hosting page 😉.

Of course, we also recommend improving the optimisation on your site, as this will help in the long run! However, if you’re looking for an instant and substantial improvement, upgrading your hosting is the better option.

Dramatically Improve Your Website Speed

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How We Can Dramatically Improve Your Website Speed

 

A Slow Website is Bad for Business (literally!)

We’ve mentioned this before in a different blog post, so as  a quick recap here are the main points:

  • The average person expects a webpage to load in 2 seconds
  • 80% of people won’t ‘buy again’ from a slow website
  • A 1-second delay in page load time can decrease page views by 11%
  • A 1-second delay in page load time can decrease conversions by 7%

So bearing the stats mentioned above in mind, it is clearly beneficial to get your website as fast as possible. Because if a slow website results in decreases, then the opposite is true for a faster site. Why miss out on more conversions?

47% of customers expect a website to load in 2 seconds graphic

 

Slow WordPress? We Can Help.

We’ve come up with a form of hosting that can dramatically improve your website’s speed.

We call it ‘Fast WordPress Hosting‘ and it does what it says on the tin. You may have seen that we moved our own website onto this hosting. As a result, we experienced a 10x improvement to our site’s load time! And we like to think it wasn’t exactly slow beforehand.

While the results for this are certainly impressive because it’s our own site it could be considered a biased test. Fair enough.

Then how about a website that isn’t HA Hosting?

 

Another Dramatic Improvement

We decided to move Stuart’s personal website to be on our Fast WordPress Hosting, to see how much of a difference it would make. Take a look at the graph below, at the difference when it was switched.

Stuart Website Switch Comparison (page load time)

As you can see, the switch happened at 10 am. And the difference is amazing (if we say so ourselves)! The load time has gone from 1200ms to 110ms – almost an 11x improvement! Bear in mind that these are a ‘base’ level and other factors such as your internet speed, traffic etc will also affect the load time of a page. Even still, this site is now considerably faster!

You can find Stuart’s own blog on the hosting switch here, and judge how fast his site is yourself.

 

Curious to See How We Can Help You?

If you want to learn more about how we can help you improve the speed of your WordPress website then click here, to go to our Fast WordPress Hosting page.

 

Keep Updated

The best way to keep updated with what we’re doing here at HA Hosting is on our Social Media:

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What is a VPS? HA Hosting Guide

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What is a Virtual Private Server?

A virtual private server (VPS) is a server that is virtual rather than physical. Think of it like a digital server that has no physical components.

These are then kept on a physical server. The biggest benefit is that multiple virtual servers can be kept on one physical server. This means you can save on physical space and money as they cost much less! These work almost the same as a regular server.

Of course, you’re limited to the total amount of physical resources available. You can’t magically create hardware!

 

A Cheaper Alternative

Virtualisation was invented by companies that were trying to be more efficient with resources. Because it was common for servers to have spare resources for busy periods and maybe future growth.

However, because of this, servers could only be using 10-20% of their resources.

To combat this, virtual servers were created.

Multiple servers could be kept on a single physical hardware server. This resulted in servers being able to use up to 80% of their physical resources. And this is much more cost-effective and efficient.

Think if you had the option to choose between 5 Virtual Servers or 5 physical servers (which won’t get fully utilised). Which do you think is the best value for money? We’ll give you a clue – it’s not physical servers 😉

Physical servers were like driving an empty bus around. Whereas virtualisation is more driving like a bus full of passengers. It utilises more of the potential.

why drive around an empty bus?

How Virtual Servers Work

Virtual servers work by using Hypervisor, something that acts as a translator between the physical hardware and the virtual ‘hardware’. Each virtual server only needs to talk to the hypervisor (not the hundreds of types of hardware). This means that the Virtual Servers are portable between physical servers.

A VM is saved as a couple of files, therefore making file management easier! One is saved as a configuration file and the other which is the whole server and its data.

Why Use a VPS?

The main benefits of using a VPS are:

  • Much lower cost than a physical server
  • Almost instant to set up
  • The flexibility of resources to scale to your growth
  • Some practical uses as a physical server
  • Convenience as a VPS can be moved around easily

Want to Find Out More?

If you want to learn more about our VPS, you can go to our VPS page here.

Fast WordPress Hosting Speed: How HA Hosting Is Built for It

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WordPress hosting speed is not a vanity metric anymore. It directly affects Google’s Core Web Vitals scoring, conversion rate, and the bounce-back-to-search behaviour that quietly drops your rankings. If your hosting stack is fighting you on every page load, no amount of theme optimisation will rescue it.

Here is what actually makes hosting fast, and how we build for it at HA Hosting.

What makes WordPress hosting fast

Four layers, all of which have to be quick or the slowest one becomes your ceiling.

Storage. The disk your WordPress files and database sit on sets the floor for everything else. Spinning disks (HDD) are a non-starter at 100 to 200 MB/s. Mainstream SATA SSDs come in around 500 MB/s. NVMe-class storage is several times faster again. We run an all-flash Ceph cluster in our Sheffield data centre, which gives every customer NVMe-class read and write performance plus self-healing redundancy across multiple physical hosts.

Network. Your hosting can only serve data as fast as the link out of the data centre allows. We run a 10 Gbit Ethernet LAGG between every compute node and our Ceph cluster, so storage traffic never bottlenecks behind public internet traffic. Externally, we peer with multiple Tier 1 carriers to keep round-trip times down for UK visitors.

RAM and CPU. WordPress is PHP, and PHP is hungry. Underprovisioned RAM forces the server to swap to disk, instantly killing speed regardless of how fast your SSD is. We provision generous RAM by default and use modern Intel Xeon cores rather than recycled hardware. Our Pro VPS plans run on HP servers with Proxmox and KVM virtualisation, no overcommit on CPU.

Caching. Even with fast hardware, serving every visitor a freshly-rendered WordPress page is wasteful. WP Rocket caching plus Cloudflare CDN means most visitors get a pre-rendered HTML page from an edge server within milliseconds. Both are included on our Fast WordPress Hosting plans.

What you measure to know your hosting is fast

Forget Time To First Byte in isolation. Look at three numbers in PageSpeed Insights:

  • LCP (Largest Contentful Paint). Under 2.5 seconds is good. If yours is 5 seconds or worse on mobile, hosting is usually a contributing factor.
  • TTFB (Time To First Byte). Under 600 ms is good. Above 1.5 seconds points squarely at hosting.
  • FCP (First Contentful Paint). Under 1.8 seconds. Cloudflare edge caching dramatically improves this.

What we do differently

Our Fast WordPress Hosting stack is built around the four layers above. All-flash Ceph storage, 10 Gbit internal network, generous RAM, no CPU overcommit, plus WP Rocket and Cloudflare on by default. We run it from our own ISO 27001 Sheffield data centre, so when something needs investigating, you are talking to the engineers who own the stack, not a ticket queue in another timezone.

Plans start at £20 per month with no setup fee and monthly contracts. If you want a benchmark before committing, we are happy to run your existing site on a trial environment and share the before-and-after PageSpeed numbers.

CloudBackup & SSL Update (June 2019)

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Hi all, another quick update about some behind the scenes things we’ve been working on this week! 

 

CloudBackup Update 

We have updated all our storage nodes to latest version. We did this to keep our infrastructure updated, meaning there should be less issues and we are working in the most secure environment. The benefitting results of upgrading the storage nodes are: 

  • Improved storage node stability 
  • Likely performance increases due to software always being tuned to the latest version 
  • Ensuring consistency across the platform 

 

SSL on Storage nodes 

We have also improved security with new SSL certificate’s (Secure Sockets Layer) on the storage nodes as well. The reasons for changing the SSLs is to reduce the number of errors you may see in browsers such as Chrome, which constantly tighten what is acceptable on the internet. 

It’s important to have an SSL on web-based things such as websites and servers. You’ll know if something has got one as it will show a small padlock icon, representing that it’s secure. There’ll also be no security warning before trying to enter and most importantly means you can rest easy when accessing the storage nodes remotely. 

Is Your Slow Website Hindering You?

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Is your WordPress Site running slow? – It could potentially be hindering your business!

Your business’ website is one of your most important assets. It’s one of the easiest ways to attract many people to your business.

However, your website could be having an adverse effect on your business! A slow website can have many negative effects that impact your business. You’d be surprised of how much of a difference it can make.

We think we’ve came up with a pretty effective solution to a slow WordPress site!

 

Did You Know?…

Only 2 Seconds

2 second expectation graphic

The average person on the internet now expects a website page to have loaded in 2 seconds before they’ll judge it as ‘slow’. Not very long, is it?

Almost 80% Expect…

And following from that, almost 4 out of 5 people are much less likely to buy from a website again if they have a bad experience with your website being slow.

80% on not returning graphic

If you combine the two stats above, there isn’t much room with the expectations within the average person on the internet.

Easy Fix. Big Impact.

We’ve came up with an easy solution to having a slow WordPress site!

We’re calling it ‘Fast WordPress Hosting’ and it does with it says on the tin – so to speak.

The technology behind it means that a singular WordPress site can be ran very effectively.

  • It works by performing a single task very well, think of it like a ‘master of one’ rather than a ‘jack of all trades’ situation.
  • Results in an improvement in WordPress speed and performance.
  • Can be a huge difference compared to regular hosting.

 

A Fast WordPress Makes a Difference.

What are the benefits you get from a fast WordPress?

More People, For Longer.

More people will spend time on your site and for longer. If you consider the two negative stats mentioned above, then if you speed up your site – the opposite is true. A fast site that meets people’s expectations means that people who purchased, have a higher chance of purchasing again from you.

Increased SEO Ranking:

11% SEO graphic

Research shows that a 1 second delay in website page loading speeds can, on average, can impact your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) results by around 11%! This can make a huge difference on how many people will find your site when searching on platforms such as Google. A high Google Ranking is typically very important as people tend to only look at results on the first few pages. The higher your ranking, the more likely you are to attract people to your site.

 

Increase in Sales:

7% reduction from 1 second

On average, a 1 second delay in page loading speed can decrease the revenue your website makes across the board by as much as 7%!

Needless to say, if you improve these speeds then you can potentially increase revenue by the same number, 7%. This won’t be an instant change by any means but will contribute to the long-term growth of your business!

 

Improve Your Website Speed with Little Effort!

Typically improving your website speed consists of optimising content and pages, something that can be fairly easy to do but can be tedious and take a long time. If only there was a fast AND easy solution…

There Is!

We’ve developed our ‘Fast WordPress Hosting’ package. It’s off Virtual Private Server technology and is an easy way to boost the speed of your WordPress!

We swapped our own site onto one and have experienced a 10x increase in speed. The main benefits are:

  • Easy Swap – We’ll set it up migrate your website for you! No stress for you at all.
  • Fast Website – They are made specifically for WordPress sites. So, they’re good at their jobs!
  • Inexpensive – Based on Virtualisation. Much cheaper to run compared to a physical server!

Want to Know More?

If you want to find out more about how our Fast WordPress Hosting can help speed up your website, you can go here. See how we can help you.

 

Stayed Tuned

We’ll posting more about VPS in the coming weeks, the easiest way to find out about when we release content like that is to stay up to date with our Social Media accounts:

Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

 

Source:

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/page-load-time-conversion-rates