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As an e-commerce retailer or a business trying to secure an online presence with a loyal and consistent following, your website performance is vital. With the consumer culture being focused on instant gratification and immediate responses, slow-loading websites and servers with processing issues can cost you significantly over time from lost business. Frustrated consumers who are looking for faster response will go elsewhere, so the best thing you can do to preserve that revenue opportunity is to optimize your server's processing applications. Here's a look at what an acceleration application can do for your server.

The Basics of Application Acceleration

With technology leading to more web-enabled applications than ever, businesses are faced with an increasing need for servers that can respond quickly and easily despite heavy resource demands from the applications and a steadily increasing number of transactions. After all, the goal is to grow your business by drawing more customers to your site on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, the security measures required for these transactions can lead to heavy resource demands on your server. Secure Socket Layer encryption is the most common service used to protect these transactions, but it requires far greater CPU resources to process encrypted transactions than it does for a standard website transaction or page response.

The best way to ensure that your customers aren't seeing slow response times on your transaction processes and secure pages is through application acceleration, which optimizes the transaction processing by making the most of the available resources so that you aren't taxing the system.

The Benefits of Compression

Since the user-side of so many web applications has become so heavily dependent on visual content, those websites have become increasingly more taxing on the servers because the standard HTTP protocol isn't as efficient at processing the higher bandwidth traffic. As a result, page loads are becoming slower because of the excess bandwidth consumption of the graphics and rich text on the sites.

One of the key things about application acceleration systems is the ability to incorporate compression tools. These tools will help to reduce the bandwidth demand of your pages by compressing the HTML or JavaScript content before transmitting the data to the user's computer. This is an important consideration for small offices and local servers where you may have some bandwidth limitations.

Most application acceleration systems include support for various open compression tools. This makes it easy to automate the compression process so that your HTML and images don't require as much bandwidth for transmission from your server to the end user. And, with so many different types of tools available for compression, you can find one that's compatible with virtually every browser. This way, you're not leaving certain visitors struggling with slow loading pages due to bandwidth restrictions simply because they use a browser that isn't as mainstream.

The Advantages of Caching

Since many websites have a series of core structural elements that are the same from page to page, storing those similar objects in an easily accessible page memory will make it easier for the page to load on the client end. It eliminates the need for loading these elements from the web server every single time a page is called from the user end.

The caching process is built into some web browsers, but you can also incorporate caching into your acceleration system. Not only does it speed up page load times for the end user, but it reduces the number of load calls on the server, which eases the wear and tear on the server as well.

If you want to create a web server that's responsive, fast and user-friendly, consider reaching out to your local web design and server maintenance specialists for guidance about acceleration to improve your web applications.