Speed is essential when it comes to maintaining a website. Not only does it improve the experience of the site's visitors, but it also helps with search engine standings.
SiteGround's servers are built with speed in mind, and hardware is handpicked by our head system administrators. We employ all the industry latest hardware and software means to boost a website's performance. These include:
Using SSD drives for our shared and Cloud hosting platforms.
The latest PHP releases with build in opcode cache.
Nginx used in conjunction with our web server software to cache and speed up the delivery of static content.
to provide a free CDN.
technology, designed to cache dynamic pages and compatible with popular CMS applications like WordPress and Joomla!. The SuperCacher also includes Memcached as means to optimize the performance of your website.
In the document root of your website you may discover large files named core.xxxxx where xxxxx is a random number. These files are called
core dumps and could be useful in investigating problems with your website application.
There are numerous reasons for the generation of these files but the most common ones are:
- A script a part of your website tried to access memory not assigned to it
- A script ended prematurely due to critical errors in its code
- Improper use of the PHP libraries
These files could be quite large and could consume a lot of disk space and you can safely delete them. But if they keep generating again it is recommended to inspect the core dumps and the code of your application's scripts to find and fix the cause. Usually the issue is produced by a poorly written extension for your application and updating or removing it resolves the issue.
The most important cache mechanism for page speed is browser caching. Most of the static files that are used on web pages can be saved on the computer of your visitor for future access.
You can add the following rules to the
.htaccess file of your application, so you can reduce the load times of your website:
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive on
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 14 days"
ExpiresByType text/xml "access plus 0 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 14 days"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 14 days"
ExpiresByType image/ico "access plus 14 days"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 14 days"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 14 days"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 14 days"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 14 days"
ExpiresByType image/svg+xml "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 14 days"
ExpiresByType video/ogg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType audio/ogg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType video/mp4 "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType video/webm "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-font-woff "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/vnd.ms-fontobject "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/xml "access plus 0 seconds"
ExpiresByType application/json "access plus 0 seconds"
ExpiresByType application/rss+xml "access plus 1 hour"
ExpiresByType application/atom+xml "access plus 1 hour"
</IfModule>
