One of the many goals while building and maintaining a Social Network is optimizing it for Performance and given the many functionalities of a social network and its growing traffic, the task of performance optimization is all the more challenging. But, with the right steps a social network can be optimized for speed and success.

Let us look at the steps that can be employed for optimizing a website built on the popular social networking web development tool, SocialEngine:

Deploy Speed Rendering Plugins: SocialEngine offers a host of plugins that optimize a site’s performance. Examples include SESpeed, eSpeed, and minify. These plugins optimize a site’s speed by performing some common activities such as combining JS files and reducing the number of HTTP requests.

Deploy A CDN: A content delivery network is a network of proxy servers that deliver a site’s information to a user based on the nearest geographical location. This helps increase the performance of a site greatly and is highly useful for a social networking website which targets users from a wide range of locations. In order to configure a CDN service with a SocialEngine website, you can install a relevant plugin such as YouNet.

Deploy A Dedicated Server: For your social engine web hosting, make sure you deploy a dedicated server with a plan of a minimum of 2GB of memory, as recommended by the official support centre of SocialEngine itself.

Use The Latest Version: A latest version of any platform is always equipped with better features and performance enhancements. So make sure you use the latest version of SocialEngine for your social network so as to gain better site performance. If you want to enhance the speed of your existing network site, make sure you perform an upgrade to the latest version.

Use Less Number of Plugins: Using more plugins automatically decreases site performance. So make sure you use less number of plugins. Using fewer plugins not only optimizes performance but also proves to be light on your overall website development costs.

Deploy An Opcode Cache On Your Site’s Server: Installing an Opcode cache on your server has proved to enhance site performance up to five times. An Opcode cache extension saves the compiled state of PHP scripts which is used when the script is requested, thereby saving a major portion of the PHP interpreter’s function.

With the implementation of the above-mentioned measures, the speed of a SocialEngine website can be optimized with success. While some of these measures such as using fewer plugins and deploying a CDN are choices made by a site owner, other measures such as installing an opcode cache can be implemented by a team delivering SocialEngine Performance Optimization Services.