Your website’s uptime is important. You want to get the highest possible revenue, make the most sales, see the best conversion rates, and increase visitor metrics. One important part of this is the website’s uptime. If your website is down, nobody can buy from it. They’ll feel frustrated and search engines may drop your ranking if your site is unreliable.
Choose A Reliable Web Host
You need a good hosting platform, like managed WordPress hosting. Not all hosts are good. Some have better uptime than others. Look for a host who offers 99% uptime at least, clear pricing, and the option to scale your hosting as your traffic goes up. Cloud hosting is a good pick, as you can scale your server size without disrupting site performance.
When you have a new site, you might choose the more affordable shared hosting. This means that your website shares its hosted space with other sites. This is cheaper, but other sites might slow yours down or crash. As your site grows, it’s better to switch to dedicated hosting.
Reduce Image Sizes
The bigger your website pages and files are, the longer they will take to download and display. If they take too long, your web pages could time out and bring down other parts of your site. Make your files smaller.
Images are usually the problem here. You can resize your images to be smaller so they use less memory, but this isn’t always possible. Use a free tool or plugin to compress your images so they take up less memory without compromising on size or quality.
Be Smart With Javascript
Another good way to speed your site up and reduce the likelihood of it timing out is to get clever with your JavaScript. JavaScript files can often take up too much memory, but by compressing them, you can reduce the load time. It’s also very important not to overload your site with code. CSS, HTML, and JavaScript often perform overlapping functions. If you combine and strip down the code you use, you will take up bandwidth overall and your site will load faster.
Optimize loading times for your remaining JavaScript, you can use asynchronous loading. This means that instead of loading the whole webpage at the same time, you set your web pages to load native content first and then any third-party content, like social media feeds, live chat boxes, and embedded videos. If the third-party content crashes, it won’t bring down the whole page.
Compress Your Website
As well as compressing your images, you can also your website pages. GZIP compression saves on bandwidth, reduces page loading time, and decreases the risks of web pages crashing because they took too long to load. Every page is compressed before it leaves your server and then decompressed by the visitor’s web browser.
Better uptime is one of the best ways to encourage customers to use your website and stay on it for longer, instead of clicking away in frustration.