Peter “Maverick” Mitchell, aka Tom Cruise, said it best! At Birthing Your Brand, we feel it too!
Speed is very important for a website… so important that Google has made it part of their algorithm for ranking your website in their search engine results page (SERPs).
When it comes to the speed of your website, there are a lot of things that go into it. These factors include the website’s performance, the server’s performance, the particular page you’re on, the connection type (WiFi vs cellular, 5G vs 3G), the user’s internet service provider, the user’s internet package, the device’s processing power, the browser itself, how many apps are running, and so much more.
However, we can only control a few of those things, mostly the website we have built and the server. We just can’t control our users even if we want to!
At Birthing Your Brand, we maintain a Virtual Private Server to host all of your websites. A Virtual Private Server, or VPS for short, is a virtual operating system that resides within a parent server and uses virtualization technology to provide dedicated resources. Our hope is that we someday grow big enough to get a dedicated server of our own so we don’t have to share! Until then, we have and maintain a VPS that is more than powerful enough to run all of your websites; plus, we can get even more resources as more users join us.
Recently though, we have had a few complaints about from our users about their website’s speed. We take these complaints super seriously and completed a major audit along with our VPS provider and have made a few changes to make your website’s performance even better!
So without getting too technical, I’ll try to explain what we have done.
#1. Virtual Private Server. We found that it was NOT our VPS that was causing the issue. We have plenty of server resources (think of your computer, so RAM, memory, and CPU power) for all of your websites. In fact, the majority of our user’s monthly payments goes towards providing overpowered server resources for your website!
#2. The Newsletter Task Scheduler. We are so excited to provide an entire newsletter platform within Birthing Your Brand (with up to 10,000 subscribers!) for each and every user. However, sending newsletters can be a super resource intensive process. To make it work better, we use a Newsletter Task Scheduler to send emails in batches. For this Newsletter Task Scheduler to work properly, it needs to be triggered by an event. When there were just a handful of users on our platform, we used a task scheduler that ran non-stop in the background; this method is accurate and fast, and uses minimal server resources on a continuous basis. Ultimately, we found that this was causing the biggest slowdown as we have grown to more than 70 websites! So to fix this, we changed our Newsletter Task Scheduler from running constantly in the background to being triggered by visitors to your website. What this means is whenever someone visits your website (even if it’s you), the task scheduler is triggered to run in the background until all of your emails are processed. This simple change has made the biggest improvement in website speed so far and was the largest burden found in our audit!
#3. Images. When you upload your images to your website, an automatic process begins to optimize your images to a smaller size WITHOUT losing any quality. This is done because our fancy iPhones with their 12 megapixel cameras take amazing photos with super large file sizes! The truth is that your website does NOT need super large file sizes; those big files will just slow your website down and not look any better than a small file. So our automatic process runs and attempts to decrease the file size by 60+%, from multiple megabytes to just one or two hundred kilobytes (there are 1,024 kilobytes in a megabyte). Even with this, images still make up the majority of the size of a page on your website.
To continue to improve performance, we have introduced a Content Delivery Network for delivery of your images. In the classic website model, all of your files are stored on a server (in our case, on our VPS), a single physical device in a specific location. This makes it so that websites load faster for users who are close to the server, and slower for those that are far away. A Content Delivery Network, or CDN, aims to shorten the physical distance between the user and the server by storing copies of your images on multiple servers throughout the world. That way, when a user goes to your website, which then sends a request to the server to load the image, the request for the image will go to the nearest location that has a copy of the file.
There are even more reasons to use a CDN for your pictures and images besides better load times too! For starters, by speeding up your website there is a better chance to rank higher in search results. Also, fast page load times increases conversions from your website visitors. There is also the benefit of better reliability and availability, improved security, and protection from DDOS attacks.
This is something that we have wanted to do since the beginning, but had some technical hurdles (this is not easy or straightforward to set-up) and financial hurdles (this costs us $$$ – don’t worry, our prices are NOT going up!) to overcome. Well, we have overcome them and this is up and running! Any new images that are added to your website will be served by the CDN. For any existing images, we will be going through each website one-by-one to sync the images with the CDN so that ALL images are served by the CDN!
#4. Cron. This is a future improvement, but something that will be necessary as we continue to grow. For those that don’t know, a Cron is a time-based scheduler for an operating system. Basically, we can’t manually do all tasks (aka jobs) required to maintain a website so we have some that are automated. Currently, we run our Cron every time someone visits your website; therefore, the more people visit your website, the more times the Cron runs. Now multiply that by all of the websites using Birthing Your Brand and you can see that this Cron is running a lot! In the near future we will be turning off this Cron and creating a new one that is scheduled to run a few times per day at times when there are very few visitors on your websites. This change most likely will not be noticeable for anyone, but it will help future proof us for when there are 500+ websites on Birthing Your Brand!
TL:DR
Making your website as fast as possible is super duper important to us! We have made, and will continue to make, improvements to make your website even faster!
