This is something that I have kept my eye on for a while. Over a year ago I started to pick up signals that Google was starting to test the value of adding page load speed to their ranking factors the signals were clear Matt Cutts principal engineer for Google was hinting about it. Then introduction of the speed test plug in for the firebug plug in and lastly seeing the data displayed in webmasters tools were all clear signs.
In April they had officially added load time to their ranking factors. What does it mean for you or your clients site? It means its time to speed it up. We will cover a few speed items that you should be considering. Some of these may be a simple code fix; the flip side is that after you run your speed test you may find that a complete site rebuild is in order.
First you need to download the speed tool. You can do this by either adding the plug in to you Firebug plug in for Firefox. Wait you don’t have the Firebug plug in you say ok here’s the link http://getfirebug.com/ now after you get that installed you will want to go here http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/ and install the speed tool.
There is another way to check the speed of your site. If you log into your Google webmaster account you will see site performance data there. Wait again you don’t have a webmasters account? OK OK go here www.google.com/webmasters/tool/ sing in or create an account and follow the instructions.
Now let’s look at some of the speed ranking factors. The key to speeding up your site is to reduce the amount of data that is sent and requested. A few things come into play, the construction of your site the kind of CMS you are using and where it is hosted to touch on just a few.
Image optimization
Images are known for slowing down sites. There are a few things you can do to optimize your images. The first tactic you can use is to optimize the size of the image in an image editing application. The second tactic is to use your CSS for design elements that do not have a layout.
Gzip compression
This is a recommendation that I see from the Google speed test on almost every site. Gzip compression is simply sending a zip file instead of send the index.html file. Why do this? Sending a zip file can say on download time and bandwidth. Plus most modern browsers support this so let them unzip it for you and show the unzipped file to the users.
Minimize DNS lookups
DNS look-ups can add up very fast. A DNS look-up happens when any object on a website is not hosted on the main server. If a site is using multiple 3rd party advertising platforms or widgets it can slow things down. In the eyes of the spiders, if they have to make several DNS look-ups this can tell them that the site speed is slow. One solution is to only use one advertising solution on your site and host additional ads locally.
Google Analytics
Google has been working on this issue for sometime now. There analytics code can be potential cause for your site to run slower. They have made some changes to their code and how it communicates with the server.
Cache
Cache is basically making a static copy of your site which the engines will display. This is increase the speed of the loading of your site. If you use a CMS platform like WordPress you will see that you site is dynamically generates which mean that every time there is a request for a page the platform needs to communicate with the database before it can fully load the page. This can take time and slow the site down. The same goes for a search engine when they hit your site; they have to wait for it to load but having a Cached version can help this issue.
Eliminate some of the crap
The more videos, images, logos and all the other crap you put on your web page can have a negative effect on performance. Sure it looks nice but search engines are not looking at how pretty your site is they want to see your content and they want to see it fast they are very busy bots and have places to go. This should be a big consideration when designing your site. If you’re going to sell advertising try only having a few ads instead of 20, and if you want to host a ton of video and images it might be wise to take a look at a content delivery network to host your video and images.
I hope you can use some of these suggestions to help improve the performance of your site and I hope it sparked a different mindset of how you look at your site.
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