So here’s the story… Earlier, one of my websites was heavily affected due to over usage of server resouces and was banned from my hosting, I didn’t know what it was about due my low-tech knowledge on hosting and what’s taking up my server resources. As the site was banned, it is affecting both my visitors as well as my income therefore I had to find a better way to deal with the problem and here is all my findings and how you too can optimize your websites to run faster as well as running on less load on your current hosting servers.

First of all… what’s eating up all your resources on your hosting server?

Here’s my list of things to keep an eye on:
1. Plugins
2. Unoptimized Image files
3. Large files
4. Large Scripts that uses SQL Databases
5. Bad Traffic/Bots and Spiders

No. 1 – Plugins
If you are an avid user of wordpress like me you will be at some point use quite a number of plugins to do certain things on your website, however having too many plugins running can use up a lot of memory, especially plugins that are built to take up a lot of resources. Therefore do note that going lightweight is always better then going heavy on the memory. There could be many functions that you don’t need or never used, eliminating those plugins can help you reduce load on your server and making less SQL quries will help you get better load-times significantly.

No.2 – Unoptimized Image Files
This can be overlooked at times as images can be easily uploaded to the server, but images can also put a lot of load on the server as well when you are getting a considerable amount of traffic. It’s simple math, it all adds up per visitor and so on. Having your images optimized is a pro-active way to reduce load on your server. Alternatively you can also use CDN services to help take away the heavy loads from your hosting server. I’ll talk a about CDN a bit later.

No.3 – Large Files
It is a common mistake to upload everything to your hosting service, actually you don’t have to and it is advicable that you plan where your files will be hosted. I don’t like the idea of putting all your eggs into one basket, in this case the large files can become a burden, therefore if it is not important files, I will host it on other file hosting services instead of my website hosting service.

No.4 – Large Scripts That Uses SQL Databases
Some scripts can be very intentsive and they need a lot of resources to run, at the same time it also makes a lot of SQL quries, some shared hosting services have a caps on the SQL quries they make in an hour, so using resource intensive scripts on your shared hosting may put your website in jepoardy.

No.5 Bad Traffic/Bots and Spiders
Unknowingly at times, it can be rather annoying because you don’t know where they come from and why they are taking up resources from your server. You can block off certain bad traffic and bots from accessing to your server and disallowing them to take away your resources like bandwidth, server processing power.

A brief look at using CDN services
This is one of the things I would highly recommend. Using a reliable CDN service is a great way to take away some of the load from your server, as CDN services distributes your content across the web, accessing to your website can speed up significantly.

Here’s 2 of the best CDN services that I highly recommend. Both have a free service, but the paid ones will always be better with more security and it is highly recommended.

1. Cloudflare
2. Incapsula

Doing the proper research and finding the correct keyword combination will bring you’re the proper rankings in the search engines and a traffic that is targeted to your site, and the added benefit is that it is free traffic. As you heard many time before content is king, your content should be structured to include the keywords that are relevant to your site, and your website needs to be SEO optimized so the search engines can spider it with ease. All the other pages on your site should revolve around a central theme and all be related in some way.

When visitors come to your website the text on the home page should explain and reflect the theme of your site and all of the other pages should relate to it. Search engine optimization or SEO is the hottest way to drive targeted traffic to your website. Your investment in the future of your website will be worth while. The reason you need to optimize your site is to get rankings in the search engines, by concentrating on search phrases and by promoting these keywords you will begin to build your rankings in the search engines.

Billions of sites are updated daily and they all need to be crawled on a daily basis. You can purchase high PR links and shorten the waiting period of getting your site in the serps. Check you site for broken links, not having links that work will have a negative effect on your sites ranking if the links stay broken for a period of time.

High quality articles are quickly snapped up and published prolifically. Every time you write an article and you get it published you receive another link pointing back to your site which will in turn increase your link popularity. Traffic is generated to your website from your signature box. This article can be freely published on a website as long as. With this wonderful innovation in web writing, each article will surely be given ample attention in terms of engine optimization and accessibility. The natural listing depends on the optimization techniques employed on and off the web site. A single article can be reprinted hundreds of times, and each time is another link back to your site. Ensure that each web page of yours would focus on a particular keyword or key phrase. If there is an article in that page, make sure that the article will only discuss and include one keyword or key phrase from the list you have made.

Getting more traffic is pointless if your site isn’t an efficient sales machine. Since there are only a “handful” of search engines that everyone uses (the major ones), this is where we place our best promotional efforts. If you encourage them to link to your site, join your newsletter, read your articles, and so on, then the traffic will increase your search engine popularity. If you only sell product, then that is what you get money for products. Traffic is a must if any online business is to succeed.