A fast website is a prerequisite for any business’s growth in today’s competitive digital age. Your customers visit your website for various reasons, like looking for information about your company, contacting you, or if you are an ecommerce business, buying your products. A long downtime for your website, especially during peak hours, can result in a loss for your business in customer trust, and eventually in the number of customers as well as financially. Your website’s SEO rank also depends on its uptime.
In this post we have given some tips which you can follow to make sure that your website stays online and runs fast for a long time without experiencing any glitches:
Choose A Good Hosting Platform
The best website hosting platform is one that offers you more than a 99% uptime guarantee. This means that your website will be down for only a few minutes in a year. Shared hosting is a good option for you if you are a new website. But as you start growing, it is ideal to switch to a Cloud host or a dedicated host. A dedicated host offers its entire bandwidth and disk space exclusively to you. A Cloud host hosts your website on an entire network of servers, which means that if one of those servers goes down, another hosts your website and ensures that it doesn’t experience any downtime.
Compress Images
If your website takes too long to load it will show a session timeout message, causing your visitors to abandon it. One of the major reasons why websites load slowly is the size of the media on them. There are multiple tools and websites that you can use to compress images before uploading them to your website while making sure that the image quality is intact.
Compress The Website
Images are not the only element of your website that you can compress. You can also compress the entire website. The software you can use for this purpose is GZIP. GZIP compresses your website before it leaves your server. The website then gets decompressed by your visitors’ browsers. This reduces the risk of the website crashing and enables it to load quickly.
Use Website Caching
When your visitors visit one of your web pages, their browser sends your webpage a request. Your website’s server then retrieves and sends every element of your webpage like the text, logo, fonts, images, etc. This detailed process is repeated every time your visitors visit your website. But when you use website caching, your server remembers the final result for each of your visitors. The cache displays the desired web pages for visitors without going through the process of loading each of its elements all over again for each visitor.
Use A CDN
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) caches the static content of your website like text, images, CSS, and JavaScript, and stores them on servers that are close to the locations of the website’s visitors. This speeds up the website and prevents it from crashing when it experiences a surge in the number of visitors.
Hire An Uptime Monitoring Service
Every website, big or small, experiences downtime frequently irrespective of how good its hosting plan is. Monitoring websites once every few minutes or an hour can prevent long and frequent downtimes, thereby reducing your website’s bounce rate. However, it is not possible to always monitor a website manually to see if it is working fine or where problems are occurring. And this is where website uptime monitoring services come in. There are many paid as well as free monitoring service providers that automate the process for you.
Improve Website Security
The security of your company and customers’ information must be of utmost priority to you as most websites are prone to hacking. Ensuring the security of customer data is paramount for improving customer trust. You can secure your website by downloading an SSL certificate and updating your password at regular intervals. A strong password is one that contains a combination of numbers, letters, and special characters.
Back Up The Website
Backing up your website’s data creates and saves its copy in one or more servers. When your website experiences downtime, you can quickly retrieve the data from one of your backup servers.
Communicate Scheduled Downtime With Website Users Beforehand
Transparency is very important for any business. Communicating your website’s downtime early helps you to earn the trust of your users. You must notify your users a few days in advance about the downtime. Put up a banner on your website to let your visitors know when it will be under maintenance. You should also send them multiple emails before the scheduled downtime day. This will help your visitors to prepare accordingly and ensure that their data doesn’t get affected.
