There are few things quite as frustrating in life as a slow-loading website. So much so in fact, that most people will abandon a website if it takes longer than 5 seconds to load. So, what do you do if yours is lagging behind a little bit?
In this article, we’re going to talk about dedicated hosting. Is it essential if you want a fast-loading website? Can you achieve speed without it? Let’s take a closer look…
What is a dedicated server?
A dedicated server, much as the name suggests, is a form of website hosting where you have an entire server all to yourself. This gives you great power and flexibility, however, as you would imagine, comes at a more expensive premium.
In any case, with a dedicated server, you can enjoy greater loading speeds which is an essential feature for a superior customer experience.
Is dedicated hosting essential if you want a fast-loading website?
So, is dedicating hosting an essentiality? Not necessarily. If you are a fairly young business and you are working on your SEO to improve the amount of traffic coming through your website, then you might not necessarily need dedicated hosting in these early stages. There are other ways to speed a website up in the meantime (which we will get to shortly). However, if you have a high-traffic website and you’ve tried everything else, then absolutely,
switching to dedicated hosting for your website will be the next viable move.
How to achieve speed without dedicated hosting?
In this modern digital age, where phone addiction is rife and attention spans are getting shorter by the second, having a fast-loading website is an essentiality. The question is, how can you achieve that without switching to dedicated hosting?
If you would prefer not to switch to dedicated hosting just yet, there are other things you can try before doing so. Here are a few tips to consider…
- Optimise your imagery: first, you can optimize the imagery on your website. Remove any images that do not add value, delete any unused images from your storage, and run your chosen images through a compression tool to reduce their file size without compromising on quality.
- Limit your HTTP requests: webpages typically need browsers to make HTTP requests for the various elements on a page (i.e., images and scripts, etc.). In some cases, dozens of these requests are made which will slow the loading time down significantly. As such, you should aim to reduce the number of elements on your webpage. Keep it tight.
- Implement browser caching: HTTP caching refers to temporary storage in browsers thus enabling users to load a previously visited website much faster. Implementing this will significantly reduce the amount of data required to load your website a second time, thus boosting its speed.
- Limit your redirects: A redirect is when a user comes to one page but gets sent to another page instead, adding extra loading time. In some cases, the use of redirects is unavoidable, but it is frequently overused. Implement strict guidelines and keep your usage to an absolute minimum.
- Minify your Java and CSS: minifying code simply means removing any code that isn’t completely necessary for a computer to understand and carry out the code – thus making the files smaller. In other words: cut the fat.
Of course, you could try all of these things (and more) and depending on the size of your website and the amount of traffic you receive, it might still load slowly. In that case, dedicated hosting is absolutely recommended.
Conclusion
In conclusion, dedicated hosting is an eventuality. At some point, as your business continues to grow and you drive more traffic to your website, you will need to switch to a dedicated server if you wish to operate at optimal speed. If you have no idea where to begin with implementing the above page load speed hacks, we recommend hiring professionals. This SEO specialist in Brisbane can help you with all of the technical, ‘back-end’ tasks, whilst driving even more traffic to your website.
Just make sure you have the server hosting capabilities to handle the growth!