Web Acceleration for Ultra-Fast Sites

The rapid growth of Ecommerce and social media has contributed to an unprecedented amount of dynamic content circulating on today's networks. This flood of data makes web acceleration of content increasingly important.

What is web acceleration and what does it do? 

Web acceleration refers to speeding up the transfer of content between a web server and the client device by optimising network traffic. This helps to increase the speed and performance of the website.

High-traffic websites must receive millions of users quickly and reliably. To meet such a volume of visitors, it is a common IT practice to add more server hardware, which can be very costly.

Web acceleration, on the other hand, employs other methods to speed up content delivery, allowing web servers to handle more client requests without requiring more hardware.

Web speed is the cornerstone of digital experience

The performance of a website is considered very important for marketing. The website represents the first impression for new customers, who can judge the company based on their digital experience. Therefore, web speed and access to information are two crucial elements.

When you design a website you want everything on it to be attractive in order to increase the number of visitors. However, as the number of users increases, you may experience poor download performance of your pages.

This problem will cause many users to leave the website in the first few seconds, known as "bounce rate". A web accelerator can solve many of the problems of a slow website, thus drastically reducing its bounce rate.

The web is the place where most consumers go when looking to make purchasing decisions. However, while a plethora of websites is convenient for customers, their proliferation presents Ecommerce companies with a major challenge: to make their website stand out for its excellent digital experience.

An Ecommerce website should focus on speed, as it is the key factor that determines whether the site will be successful or not. Sites with a fast loading time are more popular than slow ones.

Measuring performance

To maximize the return on investment (ROI) of your website, it is important to analyze its performance in order to improve it.

It is possible to measure website performance through key performance indicators. 

Core Web Vitals is a set of standardized metrics from Google that help evaluate the user experience on a website. These metrics rate how quickly a web page loads, how easy it is to interact with, and how visually stable the content is as it loads in the browser.

Main web acceleration techniques and strategies

Web accelerators can use various techniques to achieve a reduction in access time:

1. Optimization of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

One of the ways to speed up web traffic is to use load balancing to optimize the HTTP traffic flowing between requesting clients and the server.

Users access the web from a variety of devices (laptops, mobile phones, smart TVs, cameras, etc.) over connections that vary widely in bandwidth.

Content acceleration is important because the server may be busy when the client accepts the data it has just received, creating inefficiencies in server utilization and poor performance for other users.

With HTTP optimization techniques, the load balancer sits between the clients and the server, efficiently forwarding content requests to the server, maximizing speed and usage.

2. Caching

The web accelerator can cache information that is most frequently requested or recently accessed, rather than receiving it each time from the web server, so that it can be delivered to the client more quickly. The cached content may be updated at a specific time interval, to avoid delivering outdated information.

The web accelerator can also preload and cache content that the user is likely to request in the immediate future, such as the next page of a document, preparing it for quick delivery when the user requests it.

3. Compression

The web accelerator can compress large files (such as image or video files) to a smaller size, either by decreasing their quality or by sending only what has changed since the file was last requested, reducing the transfer time.

4. SSL/TLS Processing

Some web accelerators can lighten the computationally intensive processing of web servers, freeing them to deliver content faster.

For example, in the encryption and decryption of documents during secured transmissions, with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS).

5 benefits of web acceleration

By providing increased speed and reliability to websites, a web accelerator delivers immediate results in terms of ROI.

1. It helps ensure that customers choose your site and not your competitors'

Studies on web page load times show that users expect a page to load in 2 seconds and will abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. By using a web accelerator, a website loads quickly and consumers will not leave the site for a competitor's faster site.

2. Increase conversions

When a website presents users with faster load times, it generates happier customers. This means they are more likely to buy.

3. Reduces infrastructure costs

Using a web accelerator can save money on infrastructure by preventing web servers from delivering static content and encrypting SSL sessions, so web servers can do more for less.

4. Keeps web servers more secure

In addition to optimiZing the website, a web accelerator also takes care of keeping the servers secure, protecting them from attacks and keeping the site online for legitimate users.

This helps ensure that site and customer information remains safe and secure, minimizing potential downtime.

5. Automatically optimize the website

Using a web accelerator also automatically optimizes the overall functionality of the site. It reduces the size of images, minimizes JavaScript and CSS, fixes problems on the page, etc. Users not only experience a faster page, but also a better user experience.

Contact us

Aplyca is a specializes in modern web development for ultra-fast websites. Contact us to discuss your business needs.