Best Web Acceleration Software & Tools

Web Acceleration Software: Our comparison reveals the best Web Acceleration tools - here you will find more useful information

Web Acceleration, or "web acceleration" in English, refers to increasing the speed with which content is delivered between web servers and browsers. Relevant Web Acceleration software uses various techniques, such as caching and compression. The use of such tools is becoming increasingly relevant today. This is because all websites - whether those of smaller companies or large corporations - face an ever-increasing user base. In some cases, tens of - if not hundreds of thousands or even millions - of visitors must be reliably and, if possible, quickly provided with exactly what they are looking for. This can be achieved particularly powerfully by expanding the server hardware or related performance requirements. Often, however, it is sufficient to implement a specific Web Acceleration software. It is a very simple, effective, and much cheaper alternative. Web Acceleration software enables the best possible massive increase in performance, without changing the hardware setup.

Popular Web Acceleration Software:

• Fastly CDN

• Cloudflare

• Amazon CloudFront

• KeyCDN

• Gumlet

• Akamai

• Microsoft Azure CDN

• Google Cloud CDN

• StackPath CDN

• Myra Security

This is what constitutes good Web Acceleration Software in principle:

• It noticeably speeds up websites or web applications.

• Web Acceleration software can achieve positive results independently of an expansion of server performance.

• It uses one or more of the following acceleration approaches: HTTP optimization, Caching and prefetching, Compression, SSL/TLS processing.

Why is Web Acceleration Software important?

People who become aware of a problem or a need are increasingly using the web to solve corresponding cases. They search for specific products, services and mostly for relevant information. Those individuals not only want to find truly helpful web content in their search context, but they also want it to be made available as quickly and barrier-free as possible. Companies must therefore fundamentally capture exactly what challenges or desires their (potential) customers have in relation to the goods or services offered, what they expect from relevant web offerings in general, and ensure that these are promptly available. This is the only way to really create outstanding added value and ultimately unique selling points today. In this context, exceptional visual impressions and the provision of special, completely unique web applications often play an important role. Web Acceleration software can indeed make a huge contribution to efficiently meeting the aforementioned - undoubtedly very high - requirements. Creating corresponding web experiences always carries an increased risk of performance drops and longer loading times. This is because impressive, comprehensive websites with many added values or the rendering of such pages always cause larger delays than are the case with smaller, simpler internet presences. In order for everything to run smoothly and quickly despite lavish equipment, the use of a technology for website acceleration, as offered by web acceleration software, is practically indispensable. However, anyone who thinks that Web Acceleration Software is insignificant for companies with smaller websites is mistaken. Because even with these, faster loading times can make the difference. Finally, every company - whether regional or global corporation - should be aware of the website speed, because Google officially declared the so-called page speed a ranking factor as early as 2018. Faster websites, therefore, tend to rank better than slower ones. And since Google is the main point of contact for a large proportion of (potential) customers in Germany when it comes to solving concerns of all kinds, SEO and thus also the consideration of page speed is nothing less than competition-critical.

What techniques does Web Acceleration Software use?

Web Acceleration software can have different technical features. We have summarized the central processes, typically leading to a performance increase below.

HTTP Optimization

One of the most useful methods for accelerating websites is the use of a load balancer or reverse proxy server to optimize HTTP traffic between clients and servers. Users access the web from a variety of devices - laptops, mobile phones, smart TVs or cameras - and via connections with very different bandwidths. Given this mass of information and response requirements, corresponding acceleration is important because the web server can thus use its resources more efficiently. With the HTTP optimization technique, additional management between clients and servers is carried out. Requests for content are optimized to be forwarded to the backend servers. The server load improves, and the speed is maximized.

Caching and Prefetching

Web Acceleration software can cache frequently requested information or control corresponding processes on the servers optimally. Local storage is often possible. Thus, data does not always have to be retrieved from backend servers. This saves server resources and significantly accelerates the delivery of content. The Web Acceleration software can update cached content at a certain interval to avoid delivering outdated information. Similarly, it is possible for Web Acceleration software to retrieve and cache content that users are likely to request - such as the next page of a document - in advance, so that they are ready to be delivered as soon as they are requested. This, of course, leads to significantly faster processes.

Compression

Web Acceleration software can compress large files, such as images or videos, to shorten transmission times. Numerous tools allow users to significantly reduce HTML, CSS, and Javascript codes with just a few clicks, thereby increasing loading times. Among the standards, the so-called Gzip compression is particularly promising. With the help of this or through Web Acceleration software, which uses this, data volumes can be reduced by up to 70 percent in some cases.

SSL/TLS Processing

Some advanced Web Acceleration software can outsource computationally intensive processing from backend servers to deliver content faster. A common example is the encryption and decryption of documents during transfers secured with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or the Transport Layer Security (TLS).

What specific benefits can Web Acceleration software bring?

Some clear benefits of Web Acceleration software have already been indirectly recorded in the previous sections. Mainly, it has great potential to help companies operate online and thus often also offline in a truly competitive manner. Other central advantages are the following.

Increase User Experience and Reduce Bounce Rates

Numerous studies suggest that on average well over 50 percent of all desktop internet users bounce if a website's loading time exceeds 3 seconds. Mobile surfers generally have a greater understanding of slower loading times. They are used to having to wait longer due to a generally much slower mobile network. However, after 15 seconds their patience is up. If Google records a high bounce rate, it quickly concludes a poor user experience. This is anything but beneficial to the ranking. On the other hand, if content is available quickly, the experience increases.

Reduce Sales Losses

Those who leave a website again before it has completely loaded, of course, do not buy in the shop or make contact for the handling of a B2B deal. Long loading times can result in more than half of the sales potential being lost. Even if (potential) customers accept the long loading times, they still affect conversions. KISSmetrics found that a 1-second delay in loading time can reduce conversions by up to 7 percent. Amazon even speaks of 1-percent sales losses per 100 milliseconds. Even if interested parties still buy, the chance of follow-up business decreases by around 80 percent!

Boost Search Engine Optimization

The use of Web Acceleration software or the resulting faster loading times are viewed by Google from various angles and used for ranking. On the one hand, the search engine measures very precisely how users behave on websites and individual pages. If a high bounce rate is recorded, this has a negative effect on the ranking, as already mentioned earlier. However, Google also integrates the page speed into its rating much more directly - and these relevant processes have an even greater impact on the ranking or indexing. The search engine regularly crawls all subpages of each website. It processes the content at specific intervals to be able to provide always up-to-date results. The so-called crawl budget determines how many pages Google indexes on a visit. This budget is individually calculated for each domain. In simplified terms, faster websites can be captured with less crawl budget than slower ones. Very sluggish constructs are sometimes not fully registered. This means: In general, the content in Google's index is more current, the faster individual pages of the website load. The more current the content is, the more relevant the search engine classifies it for the respective target group.

Optimized Advertising Expenses per Conversion

Visitors usually reach a website not only via the organic search results on Google. Google Ads, Instagram Ads, Facebook Ads, and other online advertising channels also have enormous traffic potential. Appropriate ads or places for these must be purchased. And with these sometimes expensive visitors, it is undoubtedly particularly disadvantageous if they leave the website quickly due to poor performance. The expenses per conversion are then simply uneconomical in the worst case. However, if we manage to lead such (potential) customers to the right action quickly and effectively after the click, no money is wasted, and ad marketing is conducted under efficient basic conditions.