Top 10 Ways to Reduce Your Website's Server Load Time and Increase Page Load Time

There are many reasons why you'd want a web page to load fast while using minimal server processing resources. Here are the top ten ways to achieve it and the major reasons why you should always strive for the most efficient website!

Following from the post on the differences between a Wordpress site and a static site, this article presupposes you are already well versed in HTML code and know how a web page is constructed.

Why A Fast Loading Web Page is Desirable

As already mentioned in previous posts on web page load speed optimization, there are three major reasons for working toward achieving the most efficient web page code for your site.

The first is for your visitors. A fast loading page will keep them on you page, whereas a slow loading page may lead them to leave and find a faster website to get their information. Keep visitors on your page and they will read your content and if your site is monetized, may buy your product or click your ads. Either way, keeping visitors happy can make you more money!

The second is appeasing the search engines, especially Google. Search engines will rank your page higher if it loads fast and thereby send you more traffic that you can convert into customers. But if it loads slowly, the opposite may apply and you could lose ranking and all that free targeted traffic.

The third is keeping your hosting company happy. While you will have a certain amount of headroom for using the server's resources, it pays to try and use the minimum. When sites using a server are not resource hungry, the server will run faster, pages will load faster and the two points above will be satisfied.

One last thing: If your site takes too many resources every time a page is loaded, your host can disable your account to protect its hardware.

So you see having fast loading pages is a no brainer.

Ten Ways to Ensure Fast Loading Web Pages

The first five points concern static sites, while the second five cover Wordpress s or other database reliant CMS (Content Management system).

1. Build a simple static site rather than using Wordpress unless you really absolutely need a blog. I see so many websites out there that really don't need to be blogs and don't behave like blogs but use blogging software to display a handful of pages often overloaded with plugins and that load way slower than they need to. Keep it simple unless you really need additional functionality.
2. Keep HTML code as clean as possible and only use programmatic processing if it is absolutely necessary. Us the latest version of HTML and rather than try and control page layout and display criteria within the HTML , use a well formed CSS style sheet instead.
3. Double check your code for improperly closed tags, missing close brackets, duplicate lines of code and unnecessary statements. Comply with W3C constraints and use a code checker to make sure there are no errors on your page. Errors can cause unnecessary additional server processing and  while one may only slow things down a nanosecond or two, many errors can add up to fractions of a second or more and search engine bots will take notice of this, as will your host.
4. Watch the size of images. Anything around 30kb will load almost imperceptibly slowly for a broadband user, while files over 100kb will load more slowly. Remember that a sizable percentage of the world's Internet users are still using dial-up modems and a 30k image can take 3 seconds or more to load!
5. Video can affect the load time of your page even more than large static images if it's hosted on-site, while embedded video such as Youtube items will load only as fast as the connection between Youtube and your visitor. Aim to serve smaller video files if possible or choose a smaller dimensioned video to embed from Youtube. If visitors want to see the full size clip, they can always clock through and visit the Youtube site!
6. Wordpress (or other CMS such as Joomla, Drupal etc) require much more server side processing than simple static sites. You can still serve a fast loading blog page as long as you keep things as simple as possible. Such as: Do you really need this or that plugin? Keeping plugins to the absolute minimum to serve up the kind of site you want will help increase page load times and reduce server load.
7. As with static sites, keep image sizes to the barest minimum. It's too easy to use the "insert image" or "insert media" button and upload a huge .png image that will take until the end of next week to load up, without bothering to pre-process and optimize that image first. It is far better to do some image processing on your computer using Photoshop or similar program to reduce the file size and create an image of the exact size in pixels and perfectly optimized you want displayed on your web page.
8. Themes differ surprisingly widely in the way they handle internal processing. While most themes are correctly optimized, there are some free themes that have not been optimized as best as they should and can cause problems server side. If your page loads slowly using your current free theme, try changing it and see if there is a difference. If there is, change your theme!
9. Keep your Wordpress install up to date. One common irritation with Wordpress is the constant updates. But nevertheless it is important from a security aspect as well as an optimization one to ensure your site is running on the very latest version. There may have been processing issues with an older version that a newer one fixes, so stay up to date!
10. Keep your site secure as possible. If hackers get in, they can inject malware that will be served to visitors, insert thousands of outbound links to all sorts of bad neighborhood sites, hijack your administration panel and change you settings. A hacked site is the saddest thing to see for a webmaster who may have spent countless hours creating and evolving their site. Stay up to date with the latest security patches, installs and plugins and make it as difficult as possible for hackers to get into your database!

These are the ten major points for ensuring you are serving up a fast loading, well optimized site and an all-round great user experience for any visitor who comes upon your site, while keeping you reseller or shared hosting company happy by not hogging its resources and helping to ensure better uptime. There are many more things you can do to keep things ticking along smoothly, so use common sense and don't over complicate things when the simple solution is the best!

How to Make Your Hosting Pay for Itself

If you chose to host your sites on a reseller plan, you can make that hosting pay for itself by doing a few simple but effective things that I will tell you about here.

Before I get into the workings of what you need to do, I should first point out that this is not some trick to defraud the hosting company or get your hosting for free in any way. This is a legitimate business strategy that people are using to make their hosting work for them. Here's how:

How to Sell Hosting Yourself

You need a reseller account to do this properly, but it's as easy as anything to set aside some of your resources to sell other website owners some hosting on your account. A Hostgator reseller account comes with a front end called the WHM (Web Hosting Manager) panel that you use to maintain your websites each in its own sub-hosting account within your reseller. At least that's what you should be doing!

Each account is literally its own "shared" hosting account that you manage within you own WHM. This means that you can allocate one or more of these accounts to other people in return for a small monthly or annual (or other periodic) subscription from your "client(s)".

How to Attract Hosting Clients

To attract clients, you can make use of a variety of mediums such as Internet Marketing or web hosting forums, your own website or blog, an email list or other social media such as a Facebook page. The method you choose should be suitable as I'll set out below:

• Forums: You need to have already built up some standing and respect from your fellow forum members before you start offering them hosting on your reseller host. People don't much appreciate new forum members coming in and offering such services right off the bat, so if you want to be successful with this method, make sure you are well known, active and respected in the forum before you start making tentative steps to offering hosting services.
• Social Media: Places like Facebook are ideal for advertising your services in this way, but be a little careful how you go about it. Don't spam your family and friends with the hard sell because you'll only end up annoying the hell out ot them! Same goes for people in your circles as you don't want to alienate people.
• The List: If you have built up a substantial email list over time and are working it correctly, that is sending subscribers lots of useful informative newsletters and only the occasional sales email, then you could make a special offer of cheap hosting for the subscribers in your list. Tread carefully because people are quick to unsubscribe if they think they're being treated as cash cows, so easy does it.
• Your Website or Blog: On your own site you can do pretty much whatever you want as long as it is useful to visitors and of course you are already attracting relevant traffic to be able to sell to. The best way to advertise is to write a big article about hosting and drop plenty of hints that you are providing this service.

How Much to Charge Your Clients

How much you charge depends on what you are offering them and what you are able to offer depending on the size and resource level of your reseller account. If you have sufficient resources, you can offer unlimited bandwidth but limit storage as a reasonable percentage of your account's allocation. Remember to set aside sufficient for several sub-accounts should you be lucky enough to attract them.

You could advertise that you offer unlimited domains, which looks good but few people ever end up hosting more than a handful of domains on any one account, so you should be OK there. You should also be careful to make sure you don't charge any more than your host charges for their cheapest shared hosting account, or why should anyone use your service when they can go direct through the hosting company themselves.

Also bear in mind that there are lots of cheap hosting companies out there that are already vying for business and some are so cheap they almost give it away. That doesn't mean you should try and match them. Chances are your reseller will be more robust than a really cheap host and you'll be providing a better service.

With relatively good shared hosting available for under $5 a month, you will probably want to pitch your price a little less than that to attract business. That will be up to you and what you think you can get away with charging and still make enough to cover your own hosting costs.

An Alternative Way of Attracting Business

Do you flip websites? Then one additional source of clients could come from this and make a selling point for the sites you are selling. You could include an extra bonus that the buyer of your website gets 6 months free hosting and after that you can start charging them.

Many website owners will readily accept the free hosting and be too lazy to bother changing when the free period is up as long as you come in with an affordable price, they'll likely stay with you. This is especially so if you sell your websites with a Wordpress setup.

This is a good way of getting clients to host sites on your reseller and pay you for the privilege.

When you have enough people hosting with you, you'll find you're soon covering your costs and then making a nice profit every month. And it doesn't take long before this builds up using this method and you need to buy a second reseller to cope with demand.

A nice situation to be in, wouldn't you agree?