How to Make Your Site Load Faster

You might not think it is necessary to have your website load fast. You might think that as long as you have pertinent content available to your targeted user and it’s SEO optimized, your site will pop up on the first few ranking pages of search engines.

This is not true anymore. Google has enhanced its web crawling spiders to not only harvest information about a particular website’s content, but also about loading speed of the pages on that site. This means that even if you have the most relevant product or information matching a user’s query, if your site doesn’t load fast enough, it might not be ranked highly on the search results pages (SERPs)  by Google. Site speed might stop you from getting the visibility you deserve or need to grow your business and remain profitable.

One of the key elements to keep in mind that will make your site load faster is to reduce the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. As much as 80% of the time it takes to load your page is due to the amount of HTTP requests needed to load it the first time the user stumbles on it. This includes requests to load images, Flash, java scripts, style sheets, etc. If your initial landing page takes too long to load, many users will just click the back button instantly, meaning you will lose a potentially valuable client. Google’s spiders have realized this impatience on the part of users; that’s why they may no longer rank some websites high in the search results, despite the fact that it might contain relevant data. Here’s what you can do:

1.       You can compress images a few ways to make them less cumbersome to load. Combine your inline images into your style sheets to effectively reduce the size of your pages and thus reduce the number of HTTP requests. You can also combine multiple images into one image map; the number of HTTP requests will be fewer, but the page size will remain the same. Use CSS Sprites to combine your background …

MonsterMegs Partners with CloudFlare!

Today we are very excited to announce that we have partnered with CloudFlare, a new and innovative Content Delivery Network Provider. We have provided a small summary of CloudFlare’s service below.

CloudFlare decreases your website loading times and helps protect against malicious threats online. A few of their system highlights are:

• Your site loads faster, uses less bandwidth, and serves fewer requests by filtering out the malicious traffic.
• CloudFlare uses a CDN type delivery strategy to cache static content, reducing load times for visitors all across the world
• Increased security measures. CloudFlare makes use of its global network to identify malicious traffic and filter based on that detection.
• Statistics and traffic reporting provide a better insight into your sites traffic demographic

For more information on CloudFlare, please visit their website at https://www.cloudflare.com/overview.html.

Advantages of the CloudFlare system:

• Site Performance Improvement: CloudFlare has proxy servers located throughout the world. Proxy servers are located closer to your visitors, which means they will see page load speed improvements as the cached content is delivered from the closest caching box instead of directly off our server. There is a lot of research that shows that a faster a site, the longer a visitor stays.
• Bot and Threat Protection: CloudFlare uses data from Project Honey Pot and other third party sources, as well as the data from its community, to identify malicious threats online and stop the attacks before they even get to your site. You can see which threats are being stopped through your CloudFlare dashboard here.
• Spam Comments Protection: CloudFlare leverages data from third party resources to reduce the number of spam comments on your site
• Alerting Visitors of Infected Computers: CloudFlare alerts human visitors that have an infected computer that they need to take action to clean up the malware or virus on their machine. The visitor can enter a CAPTCHA to gain access to your site.
• Always Online Mode: In the event that our server is unavailable, visitors should still be able to access your site since CloudFlare serves the visitor a page from its cache.
• Lower CPU

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