Optimizing server performance regularly is one such best practice that every website owner should follow. When you optimize your server, you are cutting off the website loading time by up to 50%. Naturally, with the faster loading speed, your visitors will stick to your website for longer times and as a result, will reduce the bounce rate and improve user experience.

Even Google prioritizes and gives a higher ranking to those websites that have faster-loading speed.

With our article, we will be discussing five simple ways to optimize your server regardless of their server type (VPS, Cloud, or Dedicated servers).

Having said that let’s first understand what is a server.

What is a Server? (Definition)

The server is a computer or a system that offers data, services, or resources to other computers (clients). These computers or systems can communicate with the server via a local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN).

In short, a server transfer resources to the clients.

Now, let’s see what is server optimization.

What is Server Optimization?

The ideal functioning of any site is directly associated with server optimization. While you are running an online business, ensure that your website stays up and running at all times. Hence, you need to optimize your server at regular intervals especially when your business grows.

Server optimization is a technical process utilized to enhance the overall performance of a server. Various methods are used to enhance the data processing efficacy and application configuration.

However, the best practice of optimizing a server is with the help of physical hardware stabilization inside a data center.

Additionally, server optimization can also be done with the help of Virtualization technology. When the server is virtualized, it becomes more efficient as one physical server is partioned to multiple virtual servers, the single server can now handle more OS and applications.

5 Best Methods to Optimize Your Server

Here are the top 5 methods for server optimization:

Work with an Ideal Application

Most users make the mistake of using the apps that come as default on their servers. However, the defaults aren’t ideal for all use cases. So, one must find an app that improves server efficiency

Several web server owners can’t distinguish between default apps from other apps. Rather they keep on optimizing their code with the same app while not executing other methods to resolve the issue. This is the reason why their optimization technique is failing.

They must slightly change the setting according to the best fit of site load and enable the cache.

Meanwhile, you can read this article on “Benefits Of Unmetered Dedicated Servers “

Allow Caching

Caching is said to be one of the finest methods to boost the speed of a server. You can reduce the website loading time. Generally, with caching, the server saves time in the following processes fetching the files from the disk, database retrieval, execution application codes, and assembles them to form an HTML page.

Now, the server will forward the preprocessed result to every new user.

Below are the places where you need to enable cache for server optimization:

OpCode Cache

It gathers results from the previous page requests. This makes it an ideal solution for CMS solutions like Magento or Drupal.

Memory Cache

Memory cache contains the portions of app-generated data. The memory cache is stored generally on the main memory i.e: Random Access Memory. Whenever your site visitor asks for those portions, the server can instantly offer the data without needing any processing. This cache is quicker than the OpCode cache.

HTTP Cache

An HTTP cache stores a full HTML web page and doesn’t store the data in parts. Whenever the site visitor requests the page repeatedly, the local HTML file will be served to him/her. This method is quite efficient for web applications having high traffic as it is one of the fastest caching methods.

Application Cache

Content management system application like Magento and Drupal minimizes the page loading time by processing template files as pages. An application cache can be combinedly used with any of the above-mentioned caches.

By using any of the above-mentioned caching methods, you can easily optimize your server. However, make sure that you perform several experiments and find the right caching method.

Make Use of a CDN

A content delivery network or CDN is a geographically scattered network of proxy servers and their data centers that helps in reducing web page loading delay by minimizing the physical distance between your website’s server and your site visitor. Not only CDN helps in reducing page loading speed but also helps in preserving the data backup of your website.

One possible reason for slow website loading speed can be your server’s location. The server location is too far from your target audience.

We suggest that you consider latency as a factor before picking up a hosting provider. As reduced latency minimizes the overall response times.

When you use a CDN, the physical distance between the server and your site visitor is reduced, resulting in lower latency.

Regularly Track PHP Usage

When a server is running several processes constantly, it gradually becomes sluggish. In such a case, you need to track the server resource usage and identify if some useless PHP script isn’t using up the server resources.

Ensure that you regularly update your PHP. Several web hosting companies offer update services with managed hosting plans.

Additionally, you can install the PHP Compatibility Checker plugin to check out the current PHP version.

Resolve DNS Query Response Time

The last method in our list of 5 methods to optimize your server is to fix the DNS Query response time. It is a crucial factor in determining the response time of a server.

According to Google, the optimal DNS response time is under 200 ms. But most of the websites on the internet go well beyond 200 ms particularly when the traffic is from other regions than the region where the server is hosted.

For example, if your website’s traffic comes from the US and UK and you are operating from India. So, your webserver is also located in India. In such a case you will have higher response times.

To resolve this, you need to utilize distributed DNS cluster.

Conclusion

When you optimize your server, you are eventually optimizing the performance of your website. Faster website loading speed means higher user experience and lower bounce rates.

We recommend that you go for Cheap Linux VPS Hosting plans, you get a powerful and robust VPS server for optimal website performance.