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How can I speed up my site?

It might help to imagine a website as if it were a car. To maximize a car’s performance, one must tune, clean, test, service, upgrade, and maintain it over time. The same goes for a website. Bluehost may maintain the best hardware in the industry, but the software underlying each and every website requires just as much attention and long-term care to ensure peak performance.

Here are some tips to keep your website lean and mean:

1. Disable and remove unnecessary or unused software. This can include superfluous plugins, old themes, wasted add-ons, and other extra features that are just sitting there, unused. Often these elements clog your software in ways you can’t see and slow things down. The basic rule of thumb: if you’re not using it, get rid of it!
2. Upload images in a size appropriate for the WEB. Images are one of the largest drains on website load times. Try to limit the amount of images you have on your website. When you do use imagery, make sure it is exported to the exact dimensions for the space it occupies and no larger. Also, compress images as much as possible without sacrificing image quality. There are countless free utilities online that do this.
3. Install a caching plugin.  Caching is a process in which static HTML files of your website are created and given to visitors behind the scenes. Then when visitors come again to your site, any dynamic content (e.g. images) loads faster because the static material is already there, ready and waiting. If your site is a WordPress site, we recommend a plugin like WP Super Cache. You can also check out our Bluehost Help Center article about WordPress caching plugins for detailed instructions.
4. Activate CloudFlare. CloudFlare is a fantastic caching tool for all websites – especially those that for one reason or another cannot utilize a caching plugin. CloudFlare maintains a cache of particular files from your website, typically those that are traditionally problematic or require longer load times. It then stores this information on various servers all over the world. This effectively places your website closer visitors, making it load faster. With your Bluehost account, you can enable CloudFlare on your site for free! Check out our Bluehost Help Center article for further details.

These are just a few ways to quickly and easily speed up your site. You can further examine how your website is performing by using a site like GTmetrix. Services like these sometimes even offer insight as to what particular website elements need to be optimized!

When your website is tuned and running well, more of your server resources can be devoted to serving actual traffic and visitors, instead of doing heavy lifting with slow, heavy, sluggish website software. Make sure to keep your website lean and mean and you’ll be guaranteed to have more success!

If you need help with any of these steps, you can always contact our Bluehost Help Center by calling us 24/7 at 888.401.4678 or through 24/7 live chat. Don’t miss our next post that will explain the difference between various types of domain settings.

Here at Bluehost, we have big plans for 2013. We’re hitting the ground running and want to help you do the same! One of our big, ongoing projects is to bring our website to the next level. To help you do so as well, we’ve put together a few ideas that can serve as great New Year’s resolutions for your website.

If you already have a website, consider these tips on how to improve it for the new year. Remember, technology changes fast, so staying on top of these resolutions will help you have a more successful site!

1. Regularly ensure your website is optimized for search engines. This will make your site easier for people to find and increase  your overall traffic because it will be more likely to appear in search engines results. There’s a range of things to do with search engine optimization. A good first step is to watch our instructional videos on what SEO is and how it works, and how to grow your business with SEO.

2. Look into updating your website design to make it “responsive.” Responsive websites collapse, expand, and re-arrange to optimally fit the window/screen its in. This makes your site look great and be easy to use no matter where it’s viewed.Learn more by watching the Bluehost video about about responsive designs. Remember, more and more people are accessing the web from tablets, phones, and other mobile devices. Ensure your website is presented well in these formats.

3. Consider simplifying and cleaning up the overall design of your site.  Visitors should always be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. Several design elements that used to be common have since been found to distract visitors from finding what they need. Avoid using mixed fonts and instead use a readable, clean font throughout your website. Nix any flashing or moving gifs. Remove heavy drop shadows and gradients and instead consider cleaner, flat colors and objects. Overall, try to examine your website with a critical eye and make any change that enhances both its appearance and functionality.

4. Make your website is as secure and protected as possible. One effective way to do this is to verify that your scripts are always up-to-date. Outdated scripts make a site vulnerable to hackers who exploit vulnerabilities inherent in old software. If you have a Bluehost account, you will see notifications in your cPanel alerting you when core updates are available. Also examine any plugins or themes and ensure they are updated as well. We made a fun video about website security. Feel free to check it out for more tips.

If you don’t have a website, make one in 2013.

Pretty much everyone needs a website these days, whether for a business, to promote your personal brand, to blog, for a family headquarters, etc… If you still don’t have one, here’s s a quick to-do list to help you get started:

1. Set up a hosting account and choose a domain name for your website. Bluehost accounts include a free domain name and it’s easy to get started. And one of the best perks of Bluehost is that you can chat with a real life expert and ask all the questions you need, even before you sign up. Just give them a call at 888.401.4678 or visit bluehost.com to chat with them online. They’re there to help, so make sure to use them!

2. Visit the Bluehost YouTube Channel and watch our instructional videos. We’ve been working hard to build up these resources to help you and have big plans to expand these in 2013. We already have series on how to use WordPress and how to use Weebly. Both show you click-by-click, step-by-step, exactly how to build your very own website.

3. Try it out! Once you’ve watched some videos and done some research, dive in and start building your website. And if you need some help along the way, call us or live chat with us; our 24/7 support team will be there to answer any questions you may have.

These are a just a few things you can do to start the year off right with the help of Bluehost. Click here to learn more about Bluehost’s plans for 2013.

But let’s try to not hold it against the error pages. They may look intimidating, but they’re actually quite helpful if you understand what they represent. Below are the two most common error pages that our customers face. I’ll review what they mean and offer some tips on how you can diagnose them.

404: Page Not Found

This essentially means that the resource (link, picture, post, file, etc…) you’re attempting to view, click, embed or obtain is unavailable. The server attempted to find the specified file and failed.

What should I look for?

1. URL’s are case-sensitive. Verify that your URL employs the correct casing, then try again.
2. Make sure the domain name is entered properly, including any necessary subdomains and subfolders. A common mistake is to either add too much to the URL (e.g. including “/public_html”), or not including the proper subdomain (e.g. domain.com/file.php instead of sub.domain.com/file.php).
3. Verify your files are uploaded to the correct directories. Often files are uploaded to the home directory instead of the public_html directory, making them inaccessible on the Internet. You can check this using your cPanel -> File Manager or your preferred FTP program.

500: Internal Server Error

An Internal Server Error means that the server attempted to handle your request, but something went wrong in the process. Fortunately extensive logs are always kept which make diagnosing these errors pretty straightforward. Simply go to cPanel -> Logs -> Error Logs. You can scroll through entries manually, but often it is easier to search using the IP address listed on the error logs page to locate pertinent information. Press “CTRL” “F” on your keyboard to do so.

What should I look for?

1. Invalid characters in your .htaccess files. This is a special file which allows a user to control certain aspects of the Apache web server. While powerful, it must be very precisely constructed. Your Error Log will tell you if there is a problem and on which line it exists.
2. Invalid permissions are another common cause of 500-type errors. We work to ensure our customers always operate in the most secure web hosting environment possible. This occasionally means certain files are assigned permissions that don’t allow them to be accessed. Generally files or folders with permissions set to “777,” “666″ or any combination where “write” permissions are given to “group” or “world” will result in a 500 Internal Server Error as a security measure.
3. Verify you do not have invalid characters in your index.html, index.php scripts or dependent scripts. Like with the .htaccess, errors occur if these contains errant code or characters. As most websites are comprised of many files, we strongly suggest referring to your error logs for the precise location. You can also replace a suspect file with a version known to be working to see if the switch corrected the problem.

So now you can now diagnose your own site errors in just a few minutes! As always, if you have any questions, you’re always welcome to contact our world-class support department 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Chad K.
Support Communication and Project Coordinator