A lot of factors play in to how a site performs, and not all of them are within your control. Optimizing your site helps to speed it up, but also cuts down on your bandwidth usage and protects you from overages in the event of sudden popularity.

Optimization. Most sites have room for some form of optimizing. We’ll identify site elements responsible for negative performance and recommend solutions for increasing performance. Databases are a frequent source of performance issues — we’ll optimize your databases and set them up for automatic optimization in the future.

Overage planning. A sudden, unexpected influx of traffic — popularly known as the “Digg effect” — can wreak havoc, especially for small sites unaccustomed to high traffic loads. We’ll develop an overage plan to cover you, from having sufficient bandwidth and preventing server overload to being notified of the situation in the first place.

Statistics. One of the best resources for gathering performance data are your site’s statistics. We’ll set up and configure your statistics package, whether you choose an option provided by your webhost, a software-specific offering, or a third-party service like Google Analytics. If you’d like, we’ll go over the information with you as well.

Caching. Dynamic websites serve pages “on the fly”: Each time a page is loaded, the server builds the page from a combination of code files and database information. Caching speeds up page loads by serving visitors a stored copy of a page, rather than building it from scratch — it also protects you from running out of resources due to a sudden surge of visitors.

Consolidation. A number of files are sent to a user when they load a web page: the page code itself, style sheets, scripts, images and other media, and a variety of others. Each file takes time to transfer, and these transfer times add up. Consolidating files and eliminating redundant material can produce a dramatic improvement in site performance.