One of the most commonly overlooked elements in website creation is the need for speed. This is as true on the adults-only world as it is for any mainstream website. We look at design and always want to be compelling to our users and encourage sign-ups and purchases. We think about hosting costs and maintenance costs and the cost of acquiring new users and potential customers. Seldom do we consider website speed. Especially during the website creation phase, we forget about speed and go full bore into impact and presentation. It’s only when users complain and our rank suffers that we notice that performance matters and that website speed is something that deserves our attention.
Optimize All Your Images
If you already have a site and want to make it as fast as possible, the quickest path forward is to start with the easy stuff. But prioritizing the low hanging fruit, you’ll achieve results right away and can then move along to the more difficult and time-consuming tasks. With that in mind, the first thing you will want to look at is the images you are using on your site.
For most websites, images comprise the bulk of the download time from server to end-user. By optimizing your images to be as small (in size) as possible, you will ensure that you are minimizing your load time. Well-optimized images can make a slow page fast and a sluggish site seems snappier. This is because much of the time your browser spends building a page on your screen is time it is waiting for images to download.
If you are using a site building tool, you should probably not depend on that tool to optimize your images. They may resize your images so they fit your design properly, but that has less to do with optimizing for best performance than it does aesthetics. Optimize your images using Photoshop or something similar and make them exactly the size and dimensions you need. Optimize so that you achieve a good balance between image size and quality and never use images that are larger in dimension than they absolutely need to be.
Optimize MySQL And PHP
If you’re running your website on top of WordPress or Joomla (or another content manager), one of the quick and easy ways to speed up your website is to optimize your database and to be sure you are running the most up-to-date version of PHP that you can support. There are free admin tool plug-ins for Joomla and WordPress that will quickly optimize and repair your database with the click of a button. This will help to make sure that your database is quick and free from corrupt data.
You can typically choose your PHP version in CPanel (or whatever admin interface you are using). Be sure that you are using version 7+ with your modern site. With WordPress and Joomla, you can safely use PHP 7.1 or possibly 7.2 if your site is simple and does not depend on numerous plug-ins for functionality. The easiest way to test this is to keep selecting newer versions of PHP until your site breaks and then back-off to the version just before. This is a worthwhile adventure as the performance differences between older versions and new versions of PHP are anything but trivial.
Get Your Site On The Cloud
If your website has been around for more than a couple of years, it is very possible that it is sitting on a shared server with many other websites. You are sharing the processing power and resources with lots of other websites. That’s how GoDaddy can sell you hosting for $2.99 a month. One of the easiest ways to improve your website’s performance is to relocate it to a cloud-based virtual private server. You can lease your own dedicated virtual server, typically for as little as $5.00 a month, and vastly improve your site’s performance immediately. Don’t be intimidated by the scary sound of what we’re talking about here. It is very simple to set up a VPS and redeploy your website using freely available tools. HTML based sites are simply copying files. WordPress and Joomla based sites can generally be moved quickly using tools like Akeeba Backup. The effort will be worthwhile once you see the difference in performance.
If you are unsure of where to host your adult website in the cloud, be sure to see our article on cloud hosting for adult websites from a few weeks ago. There are many excellent choices available that are worth your consideration. We recommend choosing with a datacenter located as close to you as possible for the best results for you and your local users. If you are unsure of what VPS size you need, consider your website’s size and audience. Most entry-level choices are going to have the capacity to serve fairly well-visited sites. If you have a larger site with a good stream of visitors, then consider a VPS choice with multiple processors and more memory. This way you can ensure that the server itself is not holding your website back from the real performer it could be.
Summary
These are some of the high level and mid-level things you can do to ensure that your website is as fast as possible. The benefits will be a better user experience for both your visitors and for you as well, and better SEO too as search engines love good performing sites. There are additional steps you can take that will improve performance as well, such as creating your website in straight HTM5 and CSS3, which entirely avoids database latency. You can also employ the services of a content distribution network that will help to make sure your site performs well across the country and the globe, no matter where users are located. These things will help your site in multiple ways and in the long run, help you be more successful on the Internet.
