Best Backend Optimization Practices in 2021

The speed of your website matters. The faster the loading speeds of your website, the better the chances are that you will perform better in search engine result pages. Also, this can increase your conversion rates.

This is the reason why you should prioritize website speed optimization. But, before taking any step, it’s important to check the performance of your website. It’s only by doing that when you know the best thing to help you improve the performance of your website. In this post, we shall discuss the best backend optimization practices in 2021, which will improve the speed and performance of your website. Let’s delve in!

Solve the N+1 Query issues

The N+1 query problems are frequent when you assign queries to related fields in your files, rather than printing a single compound SQL query with all the reports that need to be recovered. If you use eager loading, all the related questions are assigned with one entity, rather than numerous queries. Now, this is what slows down the performance of your website, and solving these issues can change things.

Database optimization

This plays an important role when you want to improve the performance of your website. At times, failing to optimize your databases can de-normalize your database, and make your website slow.

  • Normalizing your database – this is a logical result when creating a relational database. However, some developers fail to do this at times. But, optimizing your databases shrinks the space required by the database, and also organizes your data to improve the performance of your website.
  • Database indexes – this is another thing that can slow the performance of your website. If you fail to use the database indexed properly, the performance of your website can slow down. Now, the database indexes act as the indexes of a book—each index component has its required object name, as well as an identifier that shows its location. The main reason why you should create database indexes is to search for identical data, rather than checking all the searches in your database.
  • Database denormalization – this is a hypothetical correction of normalized databases, to prevent them from giving up standard forms. Database denormalization reduces the time needed to choose queries. Also, it makes sure that redundant data is more accessible by adding it into existing tables.

Use Browser and server caching

Caching is a computing term used to describe the process of storing and reloading data so that any future requests for the data can be attended to faster. Also, caching prevents web pages from being rendered recurrently for every user.

In addition, caching allows users to handle bulk data faster while utilizing minimal server resources. Here are the two major types of caching:

  • Fragment caching – this refers to unlimited caching. The pages in your website are cached with fragment caching in case you have dynamic web applications that can become irrelevant quickly. Technical web apps might have numerous components and blocks, meaning they need to be re-rendered when you do any modification to the pages.
  • Action caching and page caching – now, this one of the most commonly used and effective caching when it comes to optimizing the performance of a website. Typically, both page caching and action caching are done on the web server.

Generally, caching helps to boost the performance of a website by reducing the load time because all cached web pages can be sent to the users several times.

Use content delivery network

Also known as CDN, a content delivery network is a group of proxy servers distributed across different geographical locations. The goal of CDN is to provide fast delivery of content to online users, regardless of their location. Now, if you host your website on one service, all user requests will be sent to that server only. This, in turn, increases the time required to process every user request. In addition, the load time increases when a user is far from the server.

However, using CDN ensures that all user requests are sent to the nearest server. This ensures that the user can access the content faster and that the website has faster loading speeds. Although this can be a bit costly, it’s very effective when it comes to optimizing the speed of a website.

Besides, CDN helps to improve scalability. The goal of every business is to attract as much traffic as possible. However, if the traffic spikes suddenly, like during holidays or because of good marketing strategies, it can lead to errors or slow website speeds—that is if you have a single server. However, with CDN, you can easily avoid this issue by distributing your load.

Bottom Line

The load speeds of your website play a major role when it comes to attracting and retaining your customers. Backend optimization, also known as the server-side of a website matters a lot when it comes to improving the performance of a website. Also, you can use orchestration platforms like Kubernetes platform when deploying your web apps can help to improve their performance. While it might not be easy to implement the techniques discussed above, doing so will prove to be worth your effort and time.

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