Hosting Settings That Speed Up WordPress

There are many ways to speed up your website—optimizing images, using Content Delivery Network, enabling caching and such. But do you know your hosting also plays a part to how fast your site loads up?

The role of hosting on your website

Hosting is the service that allows you to post your website on the internet. Hosting providers have the needed technology to make it happen. It stores or hosts websites in special computers called servers and makes your webpages viewable to users when they type in your website address on the browser.

A good web hosting provider should be able to offer virtual, dedicated and cloud servers. They must ensure your website is running 24/7 and be always available when something goes wrong.

How to optimize your hosting for speed

There are a number of settings and things you can have in your hosting structure that will improve the speed results of your website.

• Enable server caching.

Data commonly used or accessed are cached to effectively reduce load on the server each time the data is required.

• Use NGINX.

Pronounced as “engine ex”, NGINX is used as a reverse proxy and to serve static files quickly. It can utilize resources lightly and can scale on minimal hardware.

• Use Varnish caching.

Varnish caching will take all your website’s files and put them in one file. This way, there are less bits and pieces of data being served up when someone visits your website.

• Use Gzip compression

Gzip will compress the files of your website down to the smallest possible size which will make the delivery of your website to users faster.

•  Use the latest version of PHP.

The code structure WordPress uses is PHP. Each new version that comes out is generally a little faster and a little more secure. So it is important that you’re on a hosting that runs on the most recent version of PHP.

If you are on an older hosting or you have been on the same hosting for several years, you may have outdated hosting. There are likely settings in there that need to be adjusted.

Do you want to know if your hosting is optimized for speed? Get in touch with us, [email protected]. We can go over your site to see how it is performing and determine the areas where it can improve.