by samAccording to Google’s tech team, page loading speed will affect search rankings. For a long time, it’s functioned as a factor in Google Adwords but is now making the transition to organic search rankings as well. It’s of paramount importance to your SEO efforts, therefore, to maximise the potential loading speed of your page.
Think about it logically: nobody in the fast-paced world of today is going to sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for a page to load. Research indicates that as many as 31% of users will exit a page if it hasn’t loaded within 5 seconds. So if you can’t get users’ attention within 5 seconds, your Internet marketing is wasted.
Fortunately, the folks over at Google Labs recently released their “Page Speed Online” tool, a free service that will analyse any given website and suggest ways to optimise the page speed. They claim that they can help improve page speed by anything from 25 to as much as 60 per cent. Before you even check what “Page Speed Online” suggests, however, here are four simple health checks to improve page speed instantly:
Image optimisation: If your source images are much larger than their size specifications for your site, then every time your page is loaded, those images will have to load up and resize. Ensuring that the pictures are all the correct size will help your loading speed, especially if your site is rich in images. Some programmes, such as Photoshop, make this easy as they allow you to “Save for Web.” Remember that using image scaling after the picture has been inserted into a blog post, for example, on WordPress, will have no effect as the page will still upload the oversized source image before applying scaling changes.
Reduce HTTP requests: Messy interlinked code can slow down your site hugely. Even something as quick and easy as converting all of your CSS documents into one single CSS file can help improve speed. Not only this, but moving your CSS file to the “head” of the page often makes it quicker too, as a lot of browsers render pages progressively.
Fewer cookies: Almost all websites come with some degree of cookies, and they can be a really useful tool. They do tend to slow down pages when overused, however, so try to restrict your cookies to just a handful of essential ones.
Gzip Compression: This is an HTML compression tool that will take your code and “tinker with it” to improve page speed. Things that it focuses on condensing include large areas of white space, massive chunks of content, and overly complex coding.
Once you’ve checked over these essentials, you’re ready to run Google Labs Page Speed Online to mop up any left-over crumbs of slow loading. For best results, try following their recommended changes and then running the tool again. Keep following this process until the analytics tool has nothing else to suggest, and bingo, you’ve optimised your page load speed. Of course, this can be time-consuming, not to mention that dabbling with all that code could result in bringing your entire site down. In these cases, Internet marketing can help your page become as fast as it possibly can.