Are you fed up with performance issues on your website? Try these performance optimization tips right into the hosting to give the boost to social communities. Yahoo reported a 9% increase in traffic for every 400-millisecond increase in performance. Walmart experienced a 2% increase in conversions for every 1-second improvement in performance. Amazon experienced a 1% increase in revenue for every 100 ms increase in performance. Google, the behemoth as it is in providing you with visibility, also ranks your website according to its speed. What does this tell us? The faster your community is, the faster it will grow!
Now when you run a social networking platform or any other framework for that matter. It would run perfectly fine when the number of users is less. As you would grow your website becomes sluggish. At this point, each platform requires performance optimisation. There are several techniques to do this. There are many variety of tools – choosing which ones are going to work wonders for you, is tricky. Being around in this area for several years, we have used and continue to study and experiment with various approaches. Following are some of the techniques that have worked for a significant percentage of our Social Engine/Phpfox customers.
PHP Performance Optimization
- Realpath PHP cache settings are increased
- PHP open_basedir is disabled for increased PHP performance
- PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative high-performance method of running PHP based web applications
- Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is enabled and optimized for SocialEngine.
Web Server Performance Optimization
- Keep-Alives are enabled with suitable values based on traffic from Google Analytics
- Gzip output compression is enabled
- Installing plugins for javascript and CSS compression
- Using reverse proxy for caching static resources
Database Performance Optimization
- Alternative engines of MySQL for better Socialegine performance
- Database configuration based on what works best for SocialEngine
- Scripts for optimizing indexes of tables most used
Custom Optimization
- Profiling database queries and improves the most used ones
- Improvements in plugins that may be slowing your site down or using alternative ones
It is possible to do all of this by yourself or getting developers to do this. However, in our experience, the community owners are really more focused on making their community an engaging experience via functionality or graphics. Similarly, most developers can write PHP code, but very few have the experience of various tools for improving performance. One of the solutions we thought was to bake this optimization right into the hosting. So we have teamed up with Acenet hosting to provide you hosting for SocialEngine and Phpfox. Which associated with built-in PHP, web server and database performance enhancements. Custom optimization may be required when your community grows huge, but that is different for everyone. We will continue to provide it as a separate service.
Please feel free to add your choice of recommendations and tools you feel have re-powered your social community performance in the comments below. We would certainly love to add them into the list for our readers.
