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Optimizing your web site.

February 9th, 2007

Why?
Aside from helping you survive the digg effect, optimizing your web site will:

1. Make it waste.. sorry.. use less bandwidth and space (so you save money on hosting costs)
2. Help users with slow connections (e.g. dial up users) view your web site.
3. Make the world a better place: an optimized site means: less wasted time, bandwidth, electricity, etc Just imagine, if every web site optimized its content, worldwidge bandwidth usage would drop significantly

But my web host gives me one TB of space and ten TB of bandwidth daily - why should I care about optimizing my website?

1. No, it probably doesnt. If you read the fine print you will see various conditions which make it impossible for you to actually use the promised bandwidth/space. Sure your site will chug along fine but if ever it becomes suddenly popular, it will collapse
2. Web hosting companies limit accounts by CPU usage:. Again, the TOS probably includes something like “Your site will be terminated if you use too much CPU resources” Too much CPU resources means whatever the hosting company wants it to mean. Unfortunately, most modern sites tend to be very resource heavy (compared to traditional plain HTML sites).

So, how can I optimize my web site?

1. Reduce the size of commonly accessed files: If you use a graphical header, that may count for 50% of the bandwidth used by page! To reduce the size, open this image in an image editor and save at a lower compression. You can find a list of most accessed files by examining your servers logs and sorting them on file accesses. Typically your sites theme (if you use a CMS) are the most heavily accessed files
2. Choose a good webhost: beware of companies that offer you unlimited space (or seemingly impossible amounts of bandwidth/space). Summary: If the host charges 19.95 a year for one TB of bandwith a month and 11TB of space, it’s probably a scam. also, research your web host before you sign up, and see what other people say about them (this is obvious, but some people still don’t so..) .
3. CACHE the site: if you use a CMS like Wordpress, every time the site loads, it is re-rendered - i.e. the CMS engine reloads every plugin, pulls content from the database, etc. This process is VERY server intensive, and the number one cause why blogs go down (note: this applies to blogs you host on your server - if you use a blog on a server like Blogger/Wordpress.com this probably doesnt make a difference/insn’t possible). To cache the output of wordpress, you can use WP-CACHE. This will store a prebuilt version of your site and serve it intelligently. As a bonus, it will speed up your sites dramatically (as the server just has to serve the page, instead of building it from scratch).
4. Use FLICKR for image storage: Set up a flickr account and use it to store any images. (note, do not store images you are using DIRECTLY, e.g. header/footer on flickr. It’s against the TOS). By image storage here I mean general images. Flickr is good as it allows different resolutions/etc and is an excellent and reliable image host.

General tips on improving your web site

1. Remove unnecessary crap: this includes 99% of widgets and just about anything which uses Java(e.g. shout boxes, music, and so on). This ALSO includes wordpress plugins you don’t really need
2. Ensure that your site functions in all browsers (Firefox users are typically famous for overlooking this - many of them believe that anyone who doesnt use Firefox doesnt matter. Well if you want to ensure that 50% of your visitors can’t see your site, fine)
3. Make sure that the text is legible. Many people use extremely tiny text/poor contrast layouts which are a strain on visitors with poor eyesight
4. Use paragraphs - and try to summarize your information.
5. Link directly If you want to quote a lot of content from another web site

Entry Filed under: Guides