Page Load Time is So Very Important
With many looming changes waiting around the corner for Google’s search engine nobody really knows what is going to happen when their new algorithm tweak comes into affect later this year. One thing we do know is that they are on a speed kick right now and their goal is clearly to speed things up which means rewarding websites that have somewhat of a quick load time.
Here are some ways to speed up your website’s page load time:
1. Images: Do you have an image heavy website? If you use a great deal of images you are going to drastically slow down the load time of your website pages. You have to first compress the images along with using a save for web feature if you are using a program to edit them. Often times you can downgrade the quality of the image that is virtually undetectable to the human eye and will reduce the size of the image for loading purposes.
2. Website Widgets: If you are a WordPress nut like many people are you like to utilize that sidebar as much as possible. Don’t worry we all do especially if you like to at least monetize your blog to try and make some money with it you will have that side bar jammed up with widgets. Try not to use too many because each widget brings its own loading challenge. You put too many in there and you will see your website slowdown a great deal.
3. Useless Code: Optimize the coding of your website. If you have code that is simply not doing anything and doesn’t need to be there remove it. Any extra code sitting on your website pages will only add to the load time issue.
4. Background Images: I know it can be very enticing to have a nice beautiful background image on your website but those are notorious for slowing down a website. Try sticking to solid colors and non-busy images. A busy, graphic heavy background image can drastically increase a website’s load time.
These are some of the more important areas to keep an eye out for when it comes to load time of a website. Keep in mind all images used on a website as they do add to that dreaded page load time issue. The bottom line is the page load time of your website is important for the search engines and also for your visitor user experience!
11 Responses to “Page Load Time is So Very Important”
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Hi Nick,
Nice tips! However I think you inadvertantly got your words crossed with this in item #4:”A busy, graphic heavy background image can drastically reduce a website’s load time.”
Didn’t you mean drastically INCREASE the load time?
Also, with regard to point #3, can you provide examples of useless code (e.g., unused or redundant CSS parameters, etc.)?
Thanks!
Bruce Dowdy
Hi Bruce,
Thanks for reading every single word and pointing out my typo (which has been corrected!
Useless code can be for instance if someone purchase a template from somewhere and there are aspects technically implemented within the code that don’t need to be there. For instance is a navigation is hardcoded and not being used or old javascript or widget that is not longer being used…basically the point it (and I am not a web developer) but to reduce the code bloat to help improve the page load time.
Nick you are right and Its really good tips. Is there any tools where I can check page load speed?
Thanks!
Rohit
Hi SEOWebTech,
There are a ton of good tools out there to check page load time, here is the one that I use:
http://tools.pingdom.com/
Thanks for reading and your comment!
Google Webmaster tools is telling you, when your site loads slow.
Hi Christa,
Thanks, Google Webmaster tools does tell you if you site loads slow, but it does not give you a file by file analysis/breakdown of what items on the site are causing it to be slow…
If you need a breakdown file by file, use Firefox and grab the Firebug addon (Net panel) _or_ Chrome has an equivalent built in, within Developer Tools – Resources.
Thanks Adam for reading and providing these great Firefox add ons to help with page load time improvement.
Thanks!
Nick
Google is saying on it’s blog from April – http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html
While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.
So should we be worrying about the 1% that much?
Hi Doug,
Thanks so much for taking the time to dig up the article from Matt Cutts!
I would say yes 1% is worth it since, if you have a good page load time then it helps improve your user experience, increase overall conversion, etc. Personally, I have seen site that have a very slow load time due to off site factors, poor design, non-optimized photos, poor flash files, etc that HAVE impacted the crawl rate of the site. When we have clean these things up (among many other changes) their SEO has improved…
Thanks again & take care,
Nick
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