Hosting

Image optimization basics for websites

One of the largest components of a page are images. If there are too many un-optimized images on a page, the page loading will suffer. Here are a couple of quick wins for optimizing the images on your site.

The first and most important is to name and describe your images correctly. Google Image search accounts for 25% of web traffic to most sites and proper naming could result in a lot of traffic. First, rename your images to describe the content. Next, use title and alt text tags to name and describe the image again. Proper alt-tags help when a page hasn’t loaded, and the user sees only the bounding box of the image.

Next, ensure that your images are optimized for the page. Many designers throw in the largest image they have and set the image size in the page, without resizing the image. Resize and optimize images for the exact size you need them. There is a lot of freeware online that will allow and suggest the best ways to resize and optimize images for smaller file sizes. Smaller files mean faster load times, which is great for users and to rank better for Google Page Speed.

Written by Rack Alley. Get your content closer to your audience with Los Angeles web hosting and give your users faster load times and great uptime.

The key characteristics of a good web host

There are tens of thousands of web hosts online. Most are resellers of the larger companies and directly sell their services under a different label. Which makes it even harder to choose between, because you might ultimately get the same hosting service from two different providers. The solution is to choose between only the larger providers. However, choosing is still not straightforward. Here are some criteria to go by when picking between your final choices:

Your site

A lot depends on your site and its future direction. If your site is just a simple website for your business, then your needs will be different to someone with plans to the server a million visitors a month with fresh content every day.

Reliability

We all want our website to be as reliable as it can be. There is a, however, different levels of reliability. How much time can you tolerate with your website down? How quickly do you need your website back up and running?

Your requirements

Do you need a WordPress website? A custom script running? Or a simple HTML site? These questions will determine what sort of hosting and technical support you will need. Unless you are technically competent, you will need outside assistance for everything but the most basic website.

Support

This goes to the question of reliability. Different levels of uptime and support come with different costs. Don’t be fooled by the hosts that provide cheap hosting packages, the support and response times are nowhere near as good as the proper hosts. In hosting, you get what you pay for.

Rack Alley provides LA web hosting infrastructure for businesses that are looking for high-performance hosts in California.