How to Improve Website Speed without Causing Trouble?

Highway warnings that read “Speed thrills, but kills” hold true for the internet highway too. An obsessive focus on a website’s loading speed alone can leave the overall user experience botched, since the latter is dependent on a whole host of factors and not just the speed at which a page loads.

What Happens When You Open a Web Page?

While navigating a website may seem like the simplest of things, it involves significant activity behind each click.

A TCP session is triggered when there is activity on a site. HTTP protocol versions have seen improvements in the way a website request is handled, and wasteful processing has been minimized thereby improving turnaround time and resource utilization (which indicates the number of sessions a web server is able to handle at a time).

Requests involving images and other heavy files take up a lot of resources, but compression techniques have helped improve performance significantly too. Remember, the number of TCP sessions opened is directly proportional to the number of resources in an HTML document. Hence, keep it simple and concise when it comes to HTML documents.

Beyond User-Website Association

While you may be doing everything right in terms of minimizing TCP sessions, encoding content for a server brings up multiple issues. In addition to necessary services like mail services, File transfer protocol and telnet, there are some unwelcome troublemakers that can eat away resources, thereby negatively impacting user experience.

Control and eliminate access for these unwelcome visitors:

• • Web Marketing Tools: These include tools like Scrapebox or Xenu Link, which run spyware on your website. Spyware used by the web marketing community is constantly changing and evolving, especially the unethical means to run these products. Use effective spyware blockers to prevent genuine users from suffering.

• • SEO Tools Collecting Links/Data: These are the worst, since they steal content and links outright. To nip them in the bud, don’t buy any link data and keep them at bay.

• • Fake Business Intelligence Tools: In the name of tracking digital brand visibility, these tools let loose a whole host of crawling and probing elements, which are best avoided.

• • RSS Feed Fetchers: These must be allowed only after ensuring they are authentic and really required. If not validated properly, they may dump a lot of promotional links and data on your site.

• • Botnet Probes: These constantly hunt for weak spots on a website and end up hogging server resources too. Higher server utilization means lower response time for genuine users, so it’s best to block them out.

• Spam: Email spam is a real menace for users and website publishers, clogging arterial resources on the web (server or bandwidth), typically beginning with irresponsible or indiscriminate subscriptions. The add-on load of ineffective spam filters worsens the load on already burdened resources. Separating email and web services can help you minimize spam, and DOS (denial of service) attacks triggered by it.

Speed without sense is not enough. Get in touch Power To Be Found to learn more about providing an end-to-end user experience that keeps visitors coming back for more!