Choosing a high-quality hosting service means investing not only in security, reliability, and data preservation guarantees, but also in performance: the speed at which users can connect and interact with your website is fundamental for a good navigation experience, for conversion rates and in search engine optimization (Search Engine Optimization, SEO). Indeed, speed is one of the ranking factors of Google, i.e., the criteria used to give relevance to a certain page in search results.
Let’s discover together how to increase the performance of your website.
Table of contents:
Hosting and physical resources
The first features you should evaluate in a hosting service regarding performance are the physical ones, i.e. the type of hardware components that are offered.
Memory unit
They are the storage support for our files (for example, the PHP that composes an eCommerce like Magento). Depending on the model, the speed of data reading and writing can change radically. As a general rule, a hard disk drive (hard disk drive) will have inferior performance compared to a solid state drive (solid state drive). Additionally, the type of interface should be evaluated, which is at the base of the physical device that allows communication between the unit and the server motherboard: in this case as well, we can expect that an NVM Express (NVMe) will get better results than an Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI).
CPU
It is the computing unit of the server, what determines the throughput (number of requests handled per second) and consequently how many clients we can satisfy with our web service, given the cost of a certain machine. Multi-core, multi-threaded processors and those with technologies that allow for automatically increasing clock speed when system requests require it (like the Intel Turbo Boost) are ideal for a fast website: It is the same Intel that, with replicable configurations, shows us how – at parity of all other factors – a more powerful processor can make a difference, for example on WordPress sites.
RAM
The temporary memory where the processes running at a given moment are located, and which – if our hosting allows it – can be used as fast access memory to save the cache of our site. Currently, the standard for a performant RAM memory is the Double Data Rate 4 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DDR4 SDRAM), but what is important first and foremost is that it does not get saturated: we therefore need to understand if the graphic interfaces or monitoring services of our hosting keep this parameter under control.
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Hosting and Software
Beyond physical resources, the software made available by your hosting service is also crucial for your site’s performance.
Web Server
Typically, when we talk about web servers, we will have a front-end (downstream) service like nginx or h2o that manages load balancing and security certificates to guarantee the privacy of our communications with a certain site, and a back-end (upstream) service that makes our files publicly accessible, usually Apache.
A relevant first issue for performance is the type of protocol used: connections exclusively in HTTP/2 – taking full advantage of optimization directives such as Prioritization, Server Push and Latency Optimization – are state-of-the-art.
Caching mechanisms
A frequently read data can be stored in a temporary memory (cache) so that it can be retrieved directly without further reads from the database, disk or as a result of calculations and other computational logics that slow down access.
In the case of sites in PHP, like those of type WordPress, we should understand if our providers allow us to have access to:
- PHP Opcache – namely the bytecode cache (the “language” that is interpreted by the PHP engine).
- Redis, a highly versatile system that allows us to store the most frequently asked questions to our database, so that the final database (like MySQL) doesn’t even need to be contacted!
In both cases, it is important that your hosting plan includes the ability to install and configure plugins that connect your site with these systems and to perform a “refresh” (clear the cache and ensure the presence of updated content) whenever necessary.
Hosting and Monitoring
It is known that even the fastest of space vehicles, even the Heart of Gold from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, needs constant maintenance and care to keep its speed and performance: for this reason, it must be understood if your hosting adopts an out of the box monitoring and telemetry.
This varies based on your needs: if we want to check everything ourselves (with software like Grafana), we will need graphs that we can quickly consult; otherwise, it must be evaluated whether the service you have chosen offers a centralized monitoring that will be handled by technical figures.
Fast hosting for CMS: put the turbo on WordPress, Drupal, Magento…
Another relevant aspect in choosing the hosting is understanding if there are any software licenses that grant the right to use. Regarding performance, a good example are the optimization plugins for WordPress like Short Pixel or WP Rocket.
Thanks to software of this type it is possible:
- Compress as much as possible, without compromising quality and functionality, the “static” resources of your site. This applies both to CSS or Javascript files (through minification) as well as to the images you load in your media library.
- Optimize images: these will not only be compressed, but also automatically converted into the most modern image formats such as webp or AVIF. Translated: further improvements in page loading speed.
- Ensure an optimal caching policy for all static resources (particularly images and videos): this means telling your users’ browsers that, if they have already downloaded a piece of content (particularly images and videos, which are always the heaviest and most performance-impacting content)… There is no need to download it again!
- Implement the lazy loading, i.e. the asynchronous loading of images. There will no longer be a need to download megabytes and megabytes of material right away, but the browser will do it intelligently, downloading only the contents that we actually see on our screen as we scroll down the page.
Hosting and Performance: how to check the results
There is an incredibly simple way to verify if a hosting change has been effective for your site’s performance: using the dedicated auditing tools.
Tools like Google PageSpeed Insight and GT Metrix summarize the speed of your site with “scores” (both general and very specific) and are a fundamental metric for assessing if and how much improvements have been made after a migration.
Try our Hosting 4 Agency service for 30 days free and we will show you how the performance of a website of your choice has improved, which we will duplicate on our servers!
