Shortening Page Load Times

When most webmasters think of ways to improve their site, there is one particular factor they often overlook – how quickly their pages load. How fast your pages load can impact you in Google for sure and Bing as well. Not only can they impact your Quality Score for AdWords, but the entire ranking algorithm will take page-loading time into account which can be a plus or minus for you. So how do you speed up your load time to get the best boost possible?

The best way to start is by using a site analyzer. A site analyzer will let you check for general errors and see the load times of your site which is what we are most concerned with here. It shows a wide variety of information about how many scripts you have, total file size, and other factors of load time. based on what you see here, you can formulate a plan of attack.

The first thing you want to look for are broken images and paths. Next, check the loading time for all of your images and scripts. Broken paths and images kill load time because your page slows down searching for them. As little as 1 script and 2 images that aren’t loading because of bad paths can double load time. That alone is enough to give you a dip in how your site is evaluated.

Whenever possible, host your files locally. While this may require more bandwidth, you’ll gain a lot of speed by not having to go out into the web to find the images you have on your site. Quit using services like Flickr to host your images – put them on your own server since local files nearly always load faster than external files. Flickr and the like are fine for what they are, but  they kill you on load speed every time.

Make sure that you correctly tag all images with height and width tags to see a huge difference when the web browser loads the page. This sounds very small, but the results are amazing. If the browser reads the width and height of the tag, it can blow right past the image and let it load in the background while it renders the rest of the page which is where you save a lot of your load time.

Reduce widgets as much as possible because they can keep your site from loading properly. It is imperative that you use static caching if you want to really take your load speed to the next level. Web servers are good at serving static files so don‘t ignore them. Make your dynamic pages into static pages, and reduce the load on your server. This will greatly improve load time for crucial pages and you will actually see the difference in some cases. Use a service such as CSS clean to take your CSS source and strip out white spaces, line breaks, unnecessary characters.

If you make use of these tips it will help you shorten load times considerably. Since Google is  taking page load time into account for rankings as well as AdWords Quality Scores, it is a good idea to start working on it now. The longer you wait the bigger the job will be and the more penalties you may have to overcome.