Fast websites

RJdesign strives to make websites load fast. There are a few simple principles behind achieving this goal:

➢ Host the website on a standalone virtual machine or physical server such as those provided by Digital Ocean. Don't let your site be one of 200+ sites hosted on a single server. Increase CPU processing power and RAM as needed. An extremely high traffic site might benefit from a content delivery network and, if necessary, multiple webservers sitting behind a load balancer. (Note: A typical small business site would not need a content delivery network and certainly not multiple servers.)

➢ Avoid bloated, clunky web content management systems such as WordPress. RJdesign uses its own lightweight system.

➢ Keep the use of JavaScript to a minimum. JavaScript adds great functionality to a website. But the use of too many scripts, and calls to a multitude of JavaScript libraries make a website slow.

➢ Compress all images to reduce their size and loading time. Also use the most modern formats. Use webp images instead of jpeg and webm movies instead of mov.

➢ When embedding a Youtube or other video, don't use the Youtube method of downloading the full YT player. Instead, only embed the video thumbnail image.

➢ Use the most modern data compression systems such as Brotli.

➢ Employ web caching systems such as Apache mod_cache, Memcached, and PHP OPcache. Enable the PHP Just In Time compiler in conjunction with OPcache.

➢ Finetune MySql. Properly index database tables and make sure that the operating system devotes sufficient resources to MySQL. The Linux tool, Mysqltuner, can be used to analyze MySQL performance.

➢ Use the HTTP/2 network protocol. Enable Apache's Multi-Processing Module (MPM) and install PHP's FastCGI Process Manager (FPM).

➢ Use Lighthouse in the web browser development tools to analyze a website for inefficiencies. The related web developer console can be used to identify JavaScript errors.

➢ Use the Nu HTML checker to find and correct HTML coding errors.

➢ Keep all systems up to date. Use the latest software versions.