IBM Business Analytics

We all are well aware of the fact how crucial server load is. Aberdeen states we can lose visitors in a second or make visitors stay for a long time on our blog or website, depending completely on how quick our site is able to load pages and images, predominantly the homepage which has all the information. According to some researchers, it has been proven even a mere one-second delay in page load time yields 11% fewer page views, around 16% decrease in the area of customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in the sale or lead conversions.

In this write-up, I will be sharing my thorough research on how to smartly decrease server load. Do not however forget to get a reliable internet connection which allows you to implement all these ways on your website and also determine the results later. I got all my answers which has now become my backbone. I would suggest the same to everyone, but you should check if this is available in your area.

Anyhow, here is the list of top most ways endorsed by professionals to decrease server load:

Review Your Web Hosting

This point is on top of our list, for all the right reasons.  But why? Because you first need to check with your hosting provider and review the plan you are running. If you have subscribed for a shared hosting plan, it will entail sharing server space with several other companies and that would affect the speed of your website. The website speed is impacted by a good number of people using the same server. And if that is the case, you should move to a dedicated plan where you can get complete access to the server. It will visibly show the positive outcome.

Select Your Web Server Carefully

If you are using Apache, by any chance, that is a great option you have chosen, however you would probably get better results using something else, like Nginx or OpenLiteSpeed. Comparing the various available options might seem overwhelming nonetheless investing a little time during the initial stages will definitely pay off for you later as you would be in a better place to handle changes in your server requirements with the passage of time.

Caching

Caching is something that temporarily stores the pages of websites in order to decrease bandwidth and also enhances performance. Whenever you get visitors to your website, the cached version is going to deal except if it has altered since the previous cache. This mechanism protects server load time and lets your site load as fast as possible. If you enable browser caching, that is going to make things way too easy and quick for regular visitors.

Speed-up Image Loading

Image Optimization plays a vital role in the Server Load, so it's recommended to adopt correct image sizing and formatting (JPEG, GIF, or PNG). It would be good if you could resize your file as many times as necessary without sacrificing the quality – in fact there are many online tools to do that.

What you need to understand is:

Certainly, you are reading this because you want your website visitors to stay and convert into leads or benefit your business in some way. And for the many visitors who actually decide to stick around and stay for a while, if your server has slow load times, it would definitely not encourage them to return in future. According to one survey, 79% of customers said they would not return to a site with poor performance. In the same survey analysis, 52% of shoppers also stated that quick page loading is crucial for site dependability whereas 44% mentioned they do tell their friends if they come across any poor site experiences. So, the only solution that we can determine would be to speed up your website.

Even Google once underwent a massive drop of 20% in its traffic only because of an extra 0.5 seconds in the load time. As per Google, the best practice and standard time for loading any server is between 3-5 seconds. Sadly, as witnessed in its latest benchmark report outcomes, the majority of sites are nowhere around that.

Rather according to an analysis which was conducted by Google and covered around 900k mobile ad landing pages covering 126 countries, Google managed to establish that around 70% of all the websites that were analyzed during the research took approximately seven seconds for the visual content above the fold to display.

The bottom-line is:

I have tried to give an overview to you and help you kick-start, but you should constantly research more to get the best results according to your website - for any tip, hack, technology that you are considering to use for speeding up your website and decreasing the server load on your website simultaneously.