Speed Up Your Website By Knowing And Optimizing Its Server-Side Components

There are a lot of reasons that may have impacted the speed of your website. Before digging deeper into the cause, you must first know that data needs to travel from one place to another, and for that reason a certain amount of time is needed to complete the operation.

To break speed down, your website's performance is made up of both its front-end and the server-side components. These two are the parts work closely together to either make your website loads fast, or make it loads slow.

The front-end consists of HTML codes, CSS, as well as JavaScript and jQuery structures. On the server-side, this is the part of the equation where a fast and seamless site experience start.

When speed matters, your website should be well optimized on both its front-end and its server-side. You may focus on one point but should never forget about the other.

It takes two of them to make a website, so never leave one behind.

Related: Frontend Vs. Backend: Two Similar Beings That Speak Different Languages

So Why Is My Website Slow?

Snail loading

There a lot of reasons, just like earlier said.

When a visitor requested a page from your website, both of your website's front-end and server-side components need a certain amount of time to do their job. Since the two's operations are essentially sequential, their cumulative time is the total website load time.

Both of your front-end and server-side should work in tandem in an optimal setup.

A good indicator of a good server-side performance is the small amount of time it takes to generate the HTML page (page generation time). This is known as the "waiting" time of the first element in the waterfall graph, or also known as the "time to first byte".

Generally, a great performing server should be able to keep the waiting time to under one second, or at least as low as possible.

The reasons why your server performs poorly, can be either because inefficient code or database, or bottlenecks, or a low performancing server.

Every server has its own unique setup, and the solution to eliminate the issue varies and dependent to the website hosted in it. While one website may need its server-side codes to be optimized, others may just need a more powerful server to begin with. Your budget also plays an important role here as optimizing server-side components and codes for even a minor speed improvement can cost you.

Server Optimization Solutions

Web optimization

To begin improving your website's loading speed by focusing on its server-side performance, you may begin with the following.

Code Optimization

Programming languages that are popular among websites include, and not limited to: PHP, Perl, Python, ASP and others. The programming languages are then paired with popular databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL or Microsoft SQL Server. These setup are common on platforms such as Magento, WordPress, Drupal and others that are regarded as custom platforms..

Those software are usually optimized from the start. Websites that are built with them, rarely have performance issues out of the box. But as more customizations are made, the codes will give more weight to the overall system. This will eventually slow the website down, especially when the codes are not optimized.

And as for the database, codes that aren't optimized will make reading, indexing and writing queries a moment longer.

Code optimization involves analyzing the code and database queries to find the places where they're not optimized for speed. By rewriting the codes with speed in mind, or using algorithms to eliminate the bottleneck, can help in speeding up your website.

For databases, adding indexes or modifying its structure can speed up the query.

Caching

Modern websites today are mostly dynamic. What this means is that on page request, the website needs to pull data from the database to get the information it needs, insert the data into the front-end so users can see them.

This process happens each time a page is requested from the server.

A server may handle thousands of requests to deliver the same page. Like earlier said, data needs time to travel. And by having your website to contact its server in order to get data to essentially build one same page every time, will affect its overall performance.

This is where caching comes in handy.

With caching, when the server received a request for a page it has previously generated, it sends that version back immediately. This page is called a "cached page."

Without caching, a server needs to write everything down each time it is asked for one page. With caching, the server is like making photocopies of the pages it has had before. So instead of rewriting things all over again, it will just send the copies to those that ask.

This way, pages can be delivered a lot faster.

While caching can speed up a website's loading page by margins, it has downsides that should be considered. A server can't cache pages that require authentication because those pages generally have user information. Another downside is that changes to a page won't be cached until the page cache has expired.

Better Servers

There are shortcuts to almost anything, and to speed up a website from the server-side, the fastest and the easiest way, and probably also the most expensive, is to opt for having a more powerful server.

Most websites on the web are hosted on either shared servers and virtual hosting. These types of servers cost the least because they host many other websites. By having several websites inside one server, the websites share the servers' processing power and resources. This can be an issue when one website on the server needs more resources as it will affect other websites' performance.

Shared hosting is the most affordable, and can be reliable for many small websites and those that are still in their development process. But to popular, high-traffic websites and enterprise-owned websites, a shared server won't have much to offer in terms of speed and reliability.

This is when a dedicated server is needed.

Dedicated server can host a much larger website with more resources to spend. This type of server can manage different roles (querying database, media serving, etc.) to generate a faster loading website. These servers have higher specifications if compared to shared servers. What this means is that dedicated servers are better built for speed.

Website stopwatch

Conclusion

A great performing website is a combination of a great performing front-end, and an optimized server-side. No website can perform at its maximum speed performance if it has defects on either one of them.

A great website cannot be judged by its looks or design. On the web, everyone is in a hurry, and seeing a slow loading web page is something that will bother them. So if you think you have a great web design and an appealing user-experience, your work is worth to praise. But never forget your servers as they are the ones that do those heavy lifting.

Further reading: The Common Practices Of Web Design With Speed In Mind