How to Increase Php Webpage Performance - an Insight

The best and biggest search engine today is Google. If you are a webmaster who is looking for your website’s success, it is necessary that you know how to make it possible. In this regard there are numerous ways in which you can enhance the performance of your websites. These methods vary according to where it will be applied. Overall there are 3 important areas where you need to focus – server side scripting optimization, hardware and front-end performance. One of the ways is to concentrate on the PHP codes so that it runs faster and thus, allow the website to load faster. This ensures that your website performs properly for Google as well as for your users.

In order to enhance the performance of the PHP code you need to comprehend the necessary actions required to improve its efficiency. But the big question is why is it required to take measures to look out for PHP’s performance. After all some of these actions might demand significant investments while there are other resources that are available for free. It is vital to note here that performance data collection is the primary focus. For improving data is required to measure and compare how it has performed before and after. As far as PHP is concerned, the page loading time is of prime importance. There are other features as well which the developers should take note of including network latency, etc.

Cache should work for you: This is an advice that has been repeated several times. Every checklist probably contains this advice. This very fact reflects how important it is to concentrate on the caches. To achieve this end there are several tools that can work. The Memcache and Varnish are the most popular. The first step for the developer is to decide whether it is required to alter the codes again and again. In case the information remains constant, this can help to speed up by saving the CPU cycles. What one needs to remember is that there are several kinds of caches. In this case, the developers need to deal with the server-side ones.

There are primarily 3 ways in which caches help in judging the performance of the PHP based webpage – firstly, with the memory requirements; secondly, with the page load time and thirdly, by affecting the SEO process. Any webpage with slow loading time is penalized by SEO. Hence, this cannot be taken lightly.

Loops are not advised: These are frequently used in programming as they are powerful tools but they cause bottlenecks. An operation can be executed at a slow pace for once. This is okay but if a sentence is within the loop, the problem will grow with passing time. But it would be wrong to say that loops are bad. However, they should be monitored carefully to avoid unwanted situations. The need is to judge where the big loops can be found and why they are there. It is not possible to remember all the source codes but the potentially expensive loops must be taken care of. There are a number of tools, like, Webgrind, Zend Debugger and Xdebug which can help the developers in this process.

Take help from the queues: One tool that can actually help to create queues is Gearman. The USP of this tool is that instead of executing the actions inside the script, they can be defined as workers which the main script will be calling. The developers can include as many workers as required either in the same host or a new one. The client application, in the meantime, remains the same. This helps in scaling out the apps.

Be aware of database access: This ranks as the main source of performance related problems. Databases built with PHP language are quite expensive operations primarily because there is a problem with connection looping. The best way of dealing with it is to check the database indexes. The indexes where the SQL queries are incorrect can considerably affect website’s performance. However, it must also be kept in mind that database indexes cannot be done just once. The need is to change the indexing as the data keeps growing.

Manage traffic well: Any application cannot handle an increased workload all of a sudden. To counter this problem the best way is to test it first, say with 1000 users. If you do not have enough people to handle this requirement you will have to opt for tools that would help you to deal with such kind of traffic. There are a number of tools which can prove helpful.

To increase the performance of a PHP based website it is important to first answer several questions, like how many database connections do you need or how many select statements do you have. There are several such questions that the developers need to ask themselves before focusing on how to improve the performance. There are no magic tricks to boost the performance. Only a thorough detailing can help you to improve. This would help you leverage the benefits of PHP certified professionals when hiring services of a custom custom PHP development company.

We provide PHP web development services. If you would like to hire PHP developers from us, we would be glad to assist you at Mindfire Solutions.