Web Hosting & Coding Effects Website Speed

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We have been carrying out analysis over the last few days looking at hosting speed and code ensuring that we are using the best methods to build sites to help increase the speed of the Internet.

This analysis started life with this post “The Web Should Be Fast” which we published 4th November 2014.

We have been looking deeper into the realms of speeding up the way websites are delivered and looking for small improvements to help serve site files better.

Increase The Speed Of Your Website

There are various ways to increase the speed of your website and this starts at the hosting level. The hosting should be the correct level of hosting to serve the purpose and as an example a shared hosting costing £3.99 per month running a Magento website is going to be slow and not only will this website be slow, but probably every other website on the same hosting server.

If you require a website to be responsive and the platform is heavy such as Magento then you need to purchase hosting that is designed to cope and this will increase costs, but generally speaking the costs are small. OpenCart is a good platform that uses less resources and we have seen huge sites built on this platform be very quick on affordable hosting.

If you are using WordPress then shared hosting is fine due to WordPress being light on the resource requirements. With platforms like WordPress there are various plugins that can really help increase speed using things like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. These both are used as WordPress Performance Optimization (WPO) frameworks that have been designed to improve page speed using Mod_Rewrite and Caching. This is the fastest method of serving pages using Apache mod_rewrite making websites load much quicker and thus improve the user experience.

W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache Benefits:

  • Users have seen 10x improvement in overall site performance when fully configured
  • Improved conversion rates
  • “Instant” subsequent page views: browser caching
  • Optimized progressive render: pages start rendering quickly
  • Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site; visitors view more pages
  • Improved web server performance; sustain high traffic periods
  • Up to 80% bandwidth savings via minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds

Website Server Speed Testing

We carried out testing comparing Facebook, Microsoft, Adobe, Ebay, Apple & AOL and since this testing we have carried out a couple of tweaks to improve things and we have re-tested and the results are pretty amazing.

Facebook, Microsoft & Adobe Hosting Speed & Coding Test Results:-

The testing is using the following URLs www.chameleonwebservices.co.uk, www.facebook.com, www.microsoft.com & www.adobe.com.

Web Hosting Speed Testing

Web Hosting Speed Testing

The results of this latest test show we have really stood strong against the tough competition.

We still needed to compare against Ebay, Apple and AOL to see how we do this time.

Ebay, Apple & AOL Hosting Speed & Coding Test Results:-

The testing is using the following URLs www.chameleonwebservices.co.uk, www.ebay.com, www.apple.com & www.aol.com.

Web Hosting Speed Test

Web Hosting Speed Test

These test results are great for us and we can be proud of what we have achieved.

Hosting Speed & Coding Test using GT Metrix