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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.

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.

Plesk 17 Migration Update (May 2019)

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Plesk 17 Migration Update (May 2019)

Hey all, we hope you’re well! Here is another quick update on something that’s happened behind the scenes at here at HA Hosting this past week. In this past week we were hard at work and have migrated websites to a shiny new server running Plesk 17.

 

The benefits following this migration are: 

  • Ensure that you can run the latest applications including a newer version of Maria DB (version 10.3) 
  • It allows for the latest versions of PHP to be available for websites 
  • The performance of the server is noticeably much better due to these improvements

As a quick summary, the old server was running Plesk 12 so wouldn’t have been supported for too much longer. This mixed with the fact that a newer server would run faster meant an upgrade was in need! Hence the migration to Plesk 17. 

The upgrades mentioned above are great and means that we should be good for awhile now! And having the server’s performance be improved is always a good thing! When is a faster server ever bad? 😉

If there are any developments to do with either this or anything we decide to change/improve then we’ll be sure to let you know as and when they happen! We’re always looking to find ways to improve what we do here, so expect updates every so often! It’s important to us to keep you in the loop with what’s going on here!

If you have any questions about what we’ve been doing, then don’t be afraid to ask! We’re more than happy to have a quick chinwag! Or if you’re just looking to keep up to date on what’s going on you can find out either on our website or on our social media pages.

 

We’ll see you for next update some time soon!

 

Cheers, 

The HA Hosting Team