Performance Tuning for Your DNN Website
One of the prime benefit of using a CMS is the ability to make changes to the web content easily and quickly. There are a wide variety of CMS platforms that developers choose to build their websites. But it is very important that the speed of the load time of your website is fast as it will vastly impact your bottom line. Since your website visitors are becoming more and more demanding and are not willing to wait for a long time, if pages don’t load quickly, you are at the risk of losing them.
If you have a business website built on DNN, then there are a few easy tweaks that you should use to ensure that your DNN website is performing well continuously. Website performance is vital for the search engines as Google takes note that the overall performance of the site is good for search rankings.
So, to make things easier for you, I will discuss some quick and essential tips that can be used to enhance the performance of the website.
Update your DNN website to the latest version:
Your website performance also depends on the features and functionalities that the latest version of DNN offers. With the latest versions comes various new features and security updates and it is suggested that you keep your site updated to the latest version. But when upgrading a DNN installation, the cache settings may get altered automatically and so it is recommended that you set the value to HeavyCaching to improve the performance of the site.
Changing the settings of IIS:
DNN websites can be made to perform better as quite a number of improvements can come from the IIS settings. According to my opinion, the default settings for IIS for your website focuses much on limiting the resource usage and not on the performance of the website. Changing the settings for the benefit of your website will surely increase the performance. If you can focus and give more attention on minifying and compressing things, then the performance can become even better. And all these one-time improvements work for every page and helps to benefit both the site visitor as well as the search engines.
Choose the infrastructure carefully:
Whether you have decided to host your website on premises with a web hosting provider or a cloud provider, you will be able to enjoy the advantages for what you pay. If you are running a production quality website, then outages can hamper your business or organization. So, it is suggested to avoid shared hosting and choose a hosting infrastructure that is dedicated to your website.
Compression:
Using IIS compression is suggested as static compression will take care of your images and other documents, while dynamic compression will be able to handle ASP.Net content. DotNetNuke offers support for compression and offloading it to IIS is recommended as it helps to perform marginally better and also offers some other additional options. But do remember that if you enable IIS dynamic compression, then make sure that you disable DNN compression.
Configuration:
In order to increase the performance of your DNN website, uninstall any unused modules as this will eliminate any unnecessary assemblies from the /bin and boost the startup performance and also make more memory available for caching. Use memory based caching in case you are not using a shared hosting provider wherever possible. Search engines also add a load on your websites while spidering content. Take some measures to control this for e.g. remove certain spidering agents in the robots.txt file.
Choose the best DNN skin for fast load time:
Before you choose the DNN skin for your website, here are some quick tips that can help you to boost the performance of your website. Under your Host -> Host Setting Changes -> Appearance tab, uncheck the “Show copyright credit” box. Usually the CSS based skin layouts are best. Sometimes the skin can make a huge difference in the loading time of your website and if you opt for a customized skin, make sure to select a professional web designer who will adhere to the best industry practices.
“Following the above tips will surely add an extra boost to your DNN website and this will reduce your bounce rates and will also positively impact your search engine rankings.”