Optimizing Your Website for Speed is Essential
As many webmasters are set for the holiday season, they are already looking ahead to 2010. By correctly guessing what will be important to Google and other search engines regards to their ranking algorithm, can give a website a huge boost above the pack. In 2010, it looks like website speed is already at the top of most webmasters to-do lists.
Google Rankings and Website Speed
While Matt Cutts hasn't come out and said that page speed will become a ranking factor, he has said that many people in Google camp want the internet to be faster. Google Adwords advertisers are already paying higher advertising rates for slow loading webpages. The next logical step is for Google to apply this type of preference to their search results as well. Realistically, if Google starts to use speed as a part of the algorithm, then Bing/Yahoo would soon follow suit.
Keep in mind that the Google algorithm has over 200 ranking variables and even if speed does become part of the algorithm, we have no way of knowing how heavily it will be weighted.
Regardless of whether or not Google and other search engines are going to look to speed as a ranking factor, a faster website is never a bad idea. Many internet users will leave your website before it even loads of it takes too long. The internet has become synonymous with instantaneous, so faster is always better. This means that a faster loading website will create a much better user experience. Your users should always be the focus of your website, so why not make your site load faster?
Free Tools to Increasing Website Speed
There are currently several free tools available that can quickly increase the speed of your website.
Google: Page Speed
Page Speed is an open sources add-on for Firefox/Firebug. It gives you a way to evaluate the performance of your website as well as suggests ways to improve your load time. Page Speed runs several tests of your servers configuration as well as your front-end code. All of these tests are based upon well known best practices.
Yahoo: YSlow
YSlow was created by the Yahoo Developer Network to analyze your webpage make suggestions based on the results. It runs through Firefox/Firebug just like Page Speed does. It grades your website based upon three predefined rule sets. YSlow goes much farther than just offering suggestions and summarizing your pages components. It also displays specific statistics about how your page operates and provides tools that you can use including Smush.it and JSLint
Website Speed Best Practices
Google has splits every best practice into 5 categories. If you optimize your website in these five categories, then you can be sure that your website is loading as quickly as possible.
1. Optimizing Caching
The goal of effective caching is to keep your applications data off of the network. There are many resources on your website that rarely change once your website is set up. This includes CSS files, images, JavaScript files etc. All of these resources take time to download which increases the load time of your webpage. By effectively caching, you will reduce the round-trip-time be eliminating HTTP requests and reducing the overall payload size of the responses from your network.
2. Minimize Round-Trip Time
Round-trip time is the amount of time it takes for a user to send a request an the server to respond, not including data transfer. Google has identified 6 ways to accomplish this. You should start by minimizing DNS lookups, minimizing redirects, combining external Javascript and CSS, optimize the order of styles and scripts, and parallelize downloads between host names.
3. Minimize Request Size
When a user sends an HTTP request, it also sends every cookie that is associated with that domain. If the cookies are large, then they cannot fit into a single packet and will significantly increase load time. The two actions that need to be taken is to minimize cookie size and to deliver all of your static content from a domain without cookies.
4. Minimize Payload Size
The size of the data that is sent to each server will increase latency to your application. There is also a penalty for crossing any IP packet boundary. Since it is hard to know what will cross an IP boundary, it is ideal to keep your total packets under 1500 bytes. The best ways to do this include: enabling gzip compression, removing unused CSS, minifying JavaScript and CSS, deferring loading of JavaScript, Optimizing Images, and serve all of your resources from a consistent URL.
5. Optimizing Browser Rendering
Once all of the data has been downloaded by the user’s browser, it still needs to be loaded and interpreted. The best way to optimize this process is to use efficient CSS selectors, avoid CSS expressions, put CSS in the document header, and specify the image dimensions.
As speed continues to become a growing concern among webmasters and a larger focus by search engine algorithms like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, there several ways to make sure that your website remains successful. You should always follow the described best practices as well as make good use of free tools developed and provided by Google and Yahoo.
Post new comment