Most people think they have to spend more money on hosting when all they need is some tuning.
Wordpress is the world's most used content management system to make a website. With a simple software you install directly on your server you can make billions of pages and manage them all with the same ease you would manage just one page because links, categories and all that site management stuff is fully automatic.The problem is most people used share hosting. This means they use a computer to host their page but they share those computer resources with many other webmasters including IP unless you get a unique IP address, you share the RAM of the server, you share the CPU... you share most computer resources even the hard disk but each one will get his own quota, the quota you bought.
This is the cheapest approach to webhosting but has one great disadvantage, you will have a very slow website once you start to get a lot of visitors.
And if you are using Wordpress this will be even worse because each time your visitors will access your site, you will not have a ready page for them. Wordpress will have to check the server database for the content, then the links, then all the stuff you added to the page then it has to use a lot of CPU to make a page in real time and only then the page is served to you.
This process is super slow and tge biggest obstacle to website improvement for Wordpress users.
How can you have a faster site without spending that much money?
First thing to do is to cache ALL your pages. Caching means installing an extension that will previously make a static page of all your site and then when your visitors come back for more all they will see is the static page, the CPU will not have to generate this page in real time, it will have it already ready for the visitor. Super Cache for Wordpress is the best extension to do this.
The next thing to do is to limit the number of modules you have. Some people have text, images, ads, links, categories, comments, blogroll and the list keeps filling up.
Each of this module will require a lot of processing power from the CPU to access the database to see the right information and then to generate the page. Even if you are using Super Cache it will take loads of time to generate all the static pages you need. It's much better to stick to the essential.
Another thing you should do is to instruct your visitors how to make their computer ready to have faster access to your site and to the internet in general. Teach them how to get Firefox, then how to add more cache size to the Firefox, how to use Firefox Tune to get more performance and finally how to extend the time your browser remembers your site. This way when they visit your site for the second time, the pages you have not updated yet will be loaded directly from your hard disk saving them time and resources to you.
Finally you need to reduce the number of ads and analytics you have on your site. Some people think it's cool to add a lot of applications to it, and a lot of counters to it and then even more ads to it. The problem is that most of these tools will require response from a 3rd party and if that third party is slow, your own server will wait for them and only after a certain time will ignore them and continue with the site load. This can take between more one second and more ten seconds. I tried this with experimental blogs I had on Blogger and the counters are the slowest applications of all.
Many more things can be done but they are site specific, this article wil be useful to most webmasters, specific website problems should try to find help on Forums, Blogs and with it's own Hosting company.
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