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The goal of this article is to determine whether or not the cause of your website’s latency is due to your web host or due to the way you have constructed your site. This article will use examples from prominent websites and explain how to use the tools that they employ to ensure that their sites are served to their users quickly.

1. Server Location: Closer is Faster - Google is estimated to have 450,000 – 1,000,000+ servers located in cities worldwide. This helps ensure Google’s website loads quickly in part due to the minimal distance the data has to travel from their server to your computer. You can get an idea of how far away your server is by conducting a simple ping test. If your web hosting company’s server is located more than 40m/s away, you may want to look into a new web hosting provider or ask your current provider to move you to a closer data center.

2. Your Images Aren’t Optimized - Yahoo! has approximately 40 images on it’s homepage. One of the reasons the site loads quickly is that the images are small, scaled correctly and in the proper format. All of Yahoo’s menu buttons and logos are GIF files which load with ease, you want to use GIFs as much as possible on your own site as well. For photographs you will want to use JPEGs exclusively as they compress an image’s size without sacrificing quality.

Facebook is another popular website that relies heavily on images. A standard Facebook image is 600×420 pixels. Of course, only one image is displayed per page, which is why the page loads quickly: If you have a website that displays up to five photos on one page that are similar to the one above, you will want to save them from your image editing program at about 75-85% quality to ensure your page loads quickly. If you have ten, you will want to scale down to about 60% quality. The more images you have, the longer your site will take to load, so you will want to scale the quality of the images down accordingly.

3. Enable Caching - PHP caching is a server side improvement that you can make to decrease site load times. Let’s take a look at an example from WordPress, a popular, but resource intensive application. When PHP caching is enabled and a visitor goes to a page on the site, the server compiles the page once and the caching plugin then saves the page as a static html file. It then tells WordPress that the next time the page is loaded, the html file should be served. This saves the server from having to run the queries and compile php pages again. You can also have your web hosting company load an application on your server like Zend Optimizer which will boost the performance of anything written in PHP.

4. Your Web Hosting Company’s Equipment is Cheap - Often times web hosting providers will cut costs by purchasing the cheapest parts available for their servers, routers and switches. Quality equipment is important as it helps ensure the system operates efficiently, thus making your page load quickly. Google depends on reliable equipment to guarantee their millions of search queries are served as quickly as possible. Look below to compare specs from a name brand server and a generic server: Part 2 (continue reading)