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 are dedicated to providing our customers with the best, most powerful tools available. To that end, we’ve recently teamed up with CloudFlare to help you enhance your website’s speed and security. And the best part? You can enable CloudFlare for FREE with every Bluehost account!

CloudFlare is an advanced content delivery network (CDN) that provides optimal performance and security to your website. With over 14 data centers around the world, their CDN automatically caches your static website files. While dynamic content remains on your Bluehost web server, static files are physically closer to visitors. CloudFlare then uses a technology called Anycast to route your visitors to their nearest data center, helping your website load faster for visitors, regardless of where they’re located. On average, websites using CloudFlare has 65% fewer requests and uses 60% less bandwidth.

Using their intelligent global network, CloudFlare also blocks threats and limits abusive bots and crawlers from wasting bandwidth and sever sources.

We integrated CloudFlare into our Bluehost systems so that it’s easy for you to install and start using in minutes. Simply log into your Bluehost control panel (cPanel) and click on the “Upgrades” tab. From there, you can decide which CloudFlare plan is best for your site(s) and then click “Install” to get started.

CloudFlare comes in two plans: Basic and Pro. The basic CloudFlare plan is absolutely FREE and includes faster site performance, broad security protection, and basic reporting.

If you’re looking for maximum optimization, CloudFlare also offers a pro plan for $14.99, which includes real time statistic reporting, mobile optimization, advanced site security, advanced reporting, and even greater site performance improvements.

We’re excited to be working with CloudFlare to make your website, even better! If you have any questions regarding CloudFlare or how to get started, leave a comment below or call us anytime, 24/7, at 888-401-4678.

From left: Corbin Hendrickson (Bluehost), Andrea Righi (Better Linux), and David Collins (Hostgator).

We recently attended the HostingCon Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. HostingCon is the premier conference and trade show for the hosted services industry. Vendors, top technology minds, and web hosting fanatics gathered for a 3-day event of sessions, booth displays, and keynote talks. HostingCon serves as a place to learn, share, and collaborate on technologies affecting businesses.

During the conference, we also announced our partnership with CloudFlare! In addition, CloudFlare also introduced their latest technology, RailGun, which will be incorporated into Bluehost technology for the most dynamic content caching possible. Stay tuned to learn more about our partnership with CloudFlare and how it’s going to help make hosting with Bluehost even better!