Whether you are using a shared hosting account, on a VPS plan, or have your own dedicated server, hopefully your business is growing as a result of your online presence. Always stay aware of the next step in upgrading your server. Each upgrade is typically associated with an expense, so be careful to think through your upgrade plan before hand. Don't get into a situation where you have to make an impulse decision to accommodate traffic.

One of the things you can do in the interim to ensure server optimization is to deactivate plug-ins. Each of your plug-ins takes up room and resources. Only use the plug-ins you absolutely need. If you are anticipating additional traffic at a certain time, consider deactivating plug-ins until that spike is over.

Another tactic that may help take a load off your server is to use your visitors? browser caches. Every time someone chooses to visit your website, they use the same large resources to do so. Consider putting a header to make sure their browsers cache those components.

There are several other strategies you can utilize when looking to optimize your server. Optimizing images by decreasing their sizes will help without impacting the quality of the images much. Editing your theme or plug-ins, compressing JavaScript and CSS, and using eAccelerator all can have an impact on your server as well. If your server is hosting your company's URL as well, you'll want to look into a URL monitoring service to go along with the tools you select to ensure optimization.

Without directly upgrading your server, there is only so much you can do to increase its performance. The most important thing to do is to monitor your server and its growing needs. With customer retention in mind, it's better to plan ahead and plan big, than not be able to facilitate the future.