Tips for Optimizing Your Website on a Shared Hosting Plan

Tips for Optimizing Your Website on a Shared Hosting Plan

In today’s age, website optimization has become essential to achieve enhanced engagement, attract traffic, provide a user-friendly experience to your website’s visitors, and eventually increase your sales.

Once you’ve built your company’s website or a personal blog, you’d want to launch it on a shared website hosting platform to allow internet users to access it. However, without the proper optimization of your website, it’ll lead to greater downtime, below-par performance and engagement, and poor reputation. In this article, we will take a closer look at the different ways by which you can optimize the performance of the website on a shared hosting plan.

 

How Can You Optimize The Performance of Your Website on a Shared Hosting Plan?

Website optimization might seem like a complicated concept to understand and carry out, but it certainly isn’t. Simply put, website optimization caters to improving the experience users have when they visit your online website.

User-experience is key to ensuring that your website stands out among the thousands of other similar ones on the internet, and enhances your conversion rate rather than decreasing it. It is therefore important that businesses don’t optimise their website just for the sake of optimizing. It should be done with appropriate knowledge and guidance, and that’s exactly what this article is going to provide. Here’s how you can optimize your website on a shared hosting plan.

 

By choosing a reliable shared hosting provider

First things first, you need to choose a reliable and trustworthy shared hosting provider before you can actually get down with the optimization process. You should look for shared web hosting services that have good customer reviews, enough disk space and bandwidth to work with, 24/7 customer support solutions and SSL certificates, and a history of sufficient uptime.

When it comes to uptime, never settle for anything below 99%. This means that the website will remain up and running 99% of the time, which is quite decent. The best-shared hosting providers will offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

 

By making use of CDNs (Content Delivery Networks)

CDNs are certainly going to distribute your website’s content across numerous servers worldwide, thereby minimizing the load on your chosen shared hosting server and improving the content delivery speed to every user.

 

By optimizing images and media files

You can compress and resize images and other media files on your website to reduce their file size.

Larger media files are certainly going to slow down the loading time of the website significantly, thereby leading to a degraded user experience and engagement.

 

By enabling lazy loading

When you implement the lazy loading feature, the images and videos present on your website will only load when a user scrolls down the page, hence leading to the betterment of initial page load times.

 

Ensuring that your software is updated

Regularly updating the CMS (Content Management System), plugins, and themes of your website will allow you to benefit from security fixes and performance enhancements.

An updated software also ensures that any underlying bug, or an issue that needs to be dealt with, gets removed from the system without hampering the overall performance and quality of your website.

 

By minimising HTTP requests

You can minimize the number of HTTP requests your website makes by using a combination of JavaScript and CSS files. This is going to boost the performance of your website and reduce the time required to load all of the necessary resources.

 

Implementing a caching plugin

You should consider using a caching plugin, if it is compatible with your CMS, to generate static HTML versions of your webpages, thereby speeding up load times and lowering severe server load.

So, how does a caching plugin work? Well, it works by storing a cached version of your website in the browser of your visitors.

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So, the next time they visit your site, it is going to load faster as the necessary information is already there beforehand.

We Total Cache and WP Super Cache are two of the best alternatives to use as they both promise to enhance your website’s loading speed by more than 20%. Moreover, they’re free to install and use!

 

Optimizing database queries

If your website relies on a database, for instance, a MySQL database, you need to make sure that your database queries are well-optimized and efficient.

By making use of an appropriate caching plugin that is compatible with your CMS, you can significantly reduce the load on your database.

 

By removing unnecessary plugins and add-ons

The caching plugins mentioned before are necessary to reduce server load and increase the overall speed and performance of your website; however, having some of the other unnecessary plugins on your website is surely not worth it.

When you load your system with several plugins that you probably just want to see working together, you’re doing a disservice to your shared web hosting service.

The accumulation of too many poor-quality plugins can cause your system to come to a halt, become inactive, and increase its downtime more than its uptime. Always remember that the rule of thumb is decent quality and not greater quantity.

 

By installing Google PageSpeed on your hosting server

When it comes to enhancing speed, you can automatically optimize the speed of your website by making use of the Google PageSpeed software.

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Although it is a hands-off approach, it gets the job done for you quite effectively and comes at zero cost.

It makes necessary modifications to your server and files and follows the best practices that cater to your website.

 

By efficient monitoring and debugging

When you make use of tools like GTMetrix to analyze the overall performance of your website and identify the different areas of improvement, you automatically optimize the performance of your website in a shared hosting server.

With the help of this tool, or even the Google PageSpeed software, you can fix any issue or bottleneck that you find.

Some of the other popular and advantageous ways by which you can optimize your website on a shared hosting plan include limiting the usage of external resources, implementing script and content minification, utilizing Gzip compression, running compression audits, and enabling expired headers.

 

Final Words

Website optimization is surely going to make your website highly competitive and better performing than the non-optimized ones.

Optimized websites on a shared hosting platform outperform their non-optimized counterparts in every factor, such as speed, traffic, conversion rates, bandwidth and storage space, sell-throughs, ROI, and more. So, the next time you launch your website on a shared hosting platform, ensure that you’re optimizing it in all the possible ways that have been mentioned in this article.