Making Websites and Databases Faster

Websites that Drink from the Fountain of Youth

Here at The Digital Orchard, ensuring that the websites and business databases that we build perform extremely well is one of our main priorities. All of our websites and databases are built on a high-performance platform that is constantly being scrutinized, tested and optimized for the absolute best performance possible. Essentially, this ongoing process helps the websites and databases become rejuvenated and stay healthy over time. This is contrary to many hosting environments and websites that are left to collect dust over time due to lack of housekeeping and regular maintenance.

The word "performance" can have several meanings, and one of those is how fast pages are displayed. Why is this important? There are several reasons, and here's two of them:

Reason #1 - Visitors and Customers

A faster website equals happier visitors. Happier visitors equals longer visits and a higher rate of returning visitors.

People don't like to wait, not even for a second. Clicking around a website can become less enjoyable if there's a noticable delay in the pages appearing. That's why we are constantly tweaking and optimizing the underlying software to ensure that we squeeze as much performance out of the software as we can. Because we built large portions of the software ourselves, that means we can get deep into the inner workings and optimize every single line of code. We are not held hostage to code written by other developers, which is the case when using other website platforms.

Reason #2 - Search Engines (Google, Bing, etc.)

Public websites get indexed by search engines, such as Google and Bing. This helps people find them. What may not be apparent is that 10,000+ new web pages come online every single day, and this creates a very demanding job for search engines. There's only so much time in a day, so they assign a "time budget" to each indexing task. This means that they only spend a few seconds crawling around each website to check for new pages and new information to index. The more pages that fit into that time window means the better a website can ultimately keep "fresh" in the eyes of search engines. Because The Digital Orchard has placed such a high importance on fast-loading pages means that websites we build and host have an edge over competitor websites.

What's Next? Geographically-Closer Servers

Ensuring that we're providing the fastest platform for our customers means that we are always looking for new ways to improve every aspect of our services. Over the next year, we will be bringing online new hosting servers that are geographically closer to our clients. The geographic distance between a website visitor and the server they are getting a website from is a big factor in fast-loading pages, and this is the next leap forward that we want to take. For our clients located in BC, we are working with industry experts and companies from Victoria and Vancouver to source and set up the fastest servers available.

We are excited to continue to provide the best services at very affordable prices.