When using our Liquid Web Cloud Sites technology, there are a few things you can do to optimize and ensure that your site performs at its best,. This article will take you through the top five best practices to optimize your website.

Using SSL Certificates

Even though a SSL certificate is not required, it is a great security measure if you want to add secure login capabilities or ecommerce. It is recommend that you pass only the traffic that needs to be secure to the SSL servers because the non-SSL clusters are more robust and are better equipped to handle traffic spikes. To accomplish this task, create a subdomain (for example, secure.example.com) and enable SSL for the subdomain through which only secure transactions will be processed. This action allows SSL traffic to pass through a separate location and provides customers with a visual cue that they are on a secure site. See our articles on Ordering an SSL Certificate and Installing an SSL Certificate in Cloud Sites for more information on using SSLs in Cloud Sites.

Static Content Organization

Moving your static media files (images, video, audio, flash, etc.) to the content delivery network (CDN) of your choice is a great solution for great performance. Liquid Web offers CDN service through Cloudflare and you can see how to add it to your site in our article Adding Cloudflare to Your Website. This process gives your customers decreased latency when accessing media because the content is cached and served by servers closest to their physical location.

Optimizing the Database

A well-optimized database and database queries can increase the performance of your website. An inefficiently designed database can slow your website to a crawl. Optimizing queries, creating indexes, and setting the most appropriate engine type (if MariaDB) can increase the performance of your website, when done correctly. Consult a professional database administrator (DBA), if necessary.

Code Efficiently

Just like an efficient database will increase the performance of your website, efficient code also yields a better performing website and is especially true for a busy website. Reducing the number of file system operations, external calls, includes, and reducing or optimizing database queries now will help prevent issues that are not evident during light or normal traffic but would otherwise become noticeable when traffic to the website increases.

Plan for High Traffic

If you are expecting an increase in traffic to your website, please create a Creating a Support Case for your site with the following subject line:

Expected High Traffic <<websitename>>

Our environment is designed to scale automatically from small to large volumes of traffic. But since you know your business best, we ask that you update us on extra-large volume, high traffic events (HTE).

Please provide the following information about the amount of expected traffic and the date you expect it to increase. Our dedicated support team will monitor your site and server space to make sure that your site stays running at optimal levels.

Whether the site is provisioned as an SSL site, Target URLs, Source IP addresses (if known), Duration of the event.
Date and time of the event, with the time zone.
Expected traffic volume (in requests per second).
Type of application (for example, proprietary, commercial, open source)
CMS (for example, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla) if applicable. Whether the application or site makes any third-party calls to domains outside of Cloud Sites (for example, RSS feeds, APIs, cURL).
Whether the application or site caches to a file system or database.
Emergency contact information, including a cell phone number

See our article Handling High Traffic Events in Cloud Sites for more information.

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