web hosting for dummies book

Web Hosting for Dummies: A book worth reading if you are a serious WordPress website owner!

Written by a blogger, author, stay at home dad from California, the author ran a web hosting business for 9 years and found that many of his friends or clients running websites did not understand the fundamentals of website hosting.

The author is openly in love with the WordPress CMS which is a plus for you if you are using this CMS as his presentation if mainly focused on this Content Management System. You can find this book here on Amazon.

Here are a few of our take aways from this quality publication:

WordPress Web hosting and loading speed: what are the challenges?

Because there is always something to optimize, e-merchants are looking for solutions to improve their traffic, their rebound rate (the number of users who visit only one page of the site before leaving) or their conversion rate. If part of the work is related to webmarketing aspects (offer, content, ergonomics) there are also technical aspects on which it is possible to play.

The computer hosting of the website is one of them. In this article we will look at how a website’s loading speed affects its performance, and we will look at how to improve this loading speed, especially from the point of view of server optimizations.

The loading speed of a website influences both its positioning in search engines and its commercial performance. This is indeed what large e-commerce showcases such as Amazon, Shopzilla, Google or Bing would have measured.

  • For Amazon, 100 ms of additional loading time results in a 1% reduction in sales
  • 500 ms of additional loading causes Google to reduce its search time by 20%.
  • 1 second of additional loading time results in 4% less revenue per user at Bing
  • For Shopzilla, five seconds less loading time would improve turnover by 7 to 12%.

Google loading speed and algorithms

This is why search engines such as Google have included speed as a loading factor since 2010. And what you need to know is that for Google a fast site is a site that loads in less than 1.4 seconds. This raises a lot of questions, the first being, how can Google measure the loading speed of sites? To measure this speed, Google uses cookies, including its Google Chrome browser and the Google Toolbar.

According to a French study from the GESTE / Cedexis Observatory, the results of which were published in 2015, the median loading time of websites in France has slightly increased. It is 6 seconds, compared to 6.5 last December. But this is still a long way from the 1.4 seconds Google expects. In other words, for most websites, there is a significant margin for improvement.

website hosting for wordpress sites

Small tips to improving loading speed

There is a simple way to improve the loading speed of your website. For example, one of the first reflexes to have and reduce the weight of his images. Indeed, the images displayed on computers are limited by the screen resolutions anyway. There is therefore no point in working with large files, which will instead delay the loading of the page.

Another trick is to call the scripts at the bottom of the page just before the “body” tag so as not to slow down the loading of the page even if all the scripts are not yet loaded.

Using Caching on Your WordPress Site

WordPress is a dynamic content creator. That is to say that via PHP and your database, it creates dynamic pages by integrating your static elements: style sheets, animations, images, texts, etc. Without caching, the user’s browser will retrieve from your server all the static content of the page each time it is loaded. This is costly in time and resources.

CSS, which allows you to format your content, and JS, which displays dynamic content (sliders, countdowns, etc.), are useful for your site but take a long time to load.
Caching allows you to generate a “copy” of all these elements of your page that is used by browsers when users return to your site, without going through your server. This greatly optimizes the loading speed of a WordPress site, since browsers already know what styles, texts, images, etc. they should display.
To enable caching on your WordPress site, there are several free and paid plugins, but I would recommend only one, a paid one: WP Rocket.

Loading speed and improvement on the WordPress hosting side

On the hosting side, many actions are also possible.

  • check that the hosting is adapted to the use of the site (number of requests, volume of traffic…). Indeed, the machine must be powerful enough, have adequate RAM and allow to absorb traffic peaks during periods of seasonal activity (load balancing).
  • have a hosting in which the system software and applications are up to date (apache version, PHP library…)
  • use caches possible on the server side
  • use compression modules that will compress data between the server and browser
  • use a CDN system to delegate some of the hosting to other servers

As for the use of CDN, this is particularly useful when users are located in different geographical locations around the world.
Thus, these technical optimizations will prove particularly useful to improve the loading speed of sites, and almost essential if the site concerned is an e-commerce site that must constantly optimize its performance.

If you work with a CMS such as WordPress, you will find the meilleur hebergeur wordpress here and some tips can be given such as limiting the number of modules and regularly cleaning the database.

It is important for e-merchants to be able to benefit from assistance in sizing their platform and the associated service levels that will enable them to match the performance of their website with their loading time requirements.

To this end, we must not forget the importance for e-commerce sites of the security offered by a specialized and professional hosting.

Thus, in addition to an accelerated loading time favouring the conversion rates of users