If you're running a web server for a growing website, it's vitally important you do all you can to make sure you can deliver pages quickly and reliably. After all, it's not the early days of the internet anymore and with fast broadband connections and ever super-speedy fibre solutions now commonplace, no-one expects to have to wait an age while the pages they're looking for fetch content and load them up slowly.
Optimize your website with cPanel tools
In fact, delays of even just a couple of seconds could be vital in determining whether or not a visitor continues to browse your site or gets frustrated and looks elsewhere. If you're using your web presence as the primary means of advertising your business or as a direct selling platform, having an underperforming site can make you look unprofessional or outdated - an impression you can't afford to give when there's such a high level of competition online.
Hosting News recently offered some advice on how to improve this, with it noting even basic steps such as reducing the file sizes of images displayed on your page or using specific web applications like PHP caching can give a noticeable boost to your performance. However, there's more you can do to optimise your website by using some of the tools available with cPanel.
Normally, visitors to your site receive whatever pages your server sends in the original full-size files. But by using standard gzip compression, an Apache module called mod_deflate can compress content for the data transfer, with the end-user's browser then uncompressing it for display. Hosting News explained: "To enable compression in cPanel, go to the Software/Services section on your home screen and then choose 'Optimize Website'. Then, to compress all of your website's content, choose 'Compress all' and click 'Update Settings'."
All modern browsers support this, which could be a great bandwidth saver if you're running a particularly high-traffic site. You can even choose whether to compress all content, or just large element such as videos, which could be great for sites that need to deliver large files as quickly as possible.
