We are always looking at ways to improve the performance of our clients’ websites. This type of work is typically carried out at an individual site level, but we’ve been able to do something a little different over the past few weeks.
At no additional cost to our clients, we’ve delivered an update that has seen a performance improvement across dozens of the WordPress sites we host. The results have been impressive, with load times reduced by up to 40% in some cases. With speed and loading times being a vital SEO metric to improve already efficient sites by that sort of percentage is pretty impressive and will have a positive impact on search results.
We appreciate that most clients are just happy to see the improvement and let us get on with the job, but for those technically minded amongst you, wanting to know what we’ve done involves our utilisation of Memcached to overcome the problems faced by large data caches.
What is Memcached?
Memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-based websites by caching data and objects in RAM, to reduce the number of times an external data source must be read. Memcached is free and open-source software with a revised BSD license. It might sound simple, however, it takes a little knowledge to implement correctly.
The improvements that are enabled by it include:
– Verification of the integrity of the system/source code of the website.
– Update to the most recent version of WordPress to improve security
– Update to the most recent version of all WordPress plugins to improve security
– Site optimisation to improve speed and web positioning
Want a 40% improvement in your website performance?
It’s not just existing clients we can help. For example, if your website is hosted on WordPress, then we’ll be able to conduct a free mini-audit to ascertain whether we can have the same effect. Sound interesting? Want us to check? Get in touch here.