Ways to Speed up Your Page Load Time

How fast your pages load can impact you in Google. Not only can they impact your Quality Score for AdWords, but rumor has it that soon the entire ranking algorithm will take page-loading time into account. So how do you speed up your load time?

Use a site analyzer. These let you check for general errors and see the load times of your site; it shows tons of information about how many scripts you have, total file size, and other factors of load time.

Check for broken images and paths, as well as loading time for all of your images and scripts. Broken paths and images kill load time. As little as 1 script and 2 images that aren’t loading because of bad paths can double load time.

Host files locally – this may require more bandwidth, but you’ll gain a lot of speed by not having to go out into the web to find the image. 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.

Correctly tag images with height and width tags to see a huge difference when the web browser loads the page. 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.

Reduce widgets – they can keep your site from loading properly. Also, use static caching – web servers are good at serving static files. Make your dynamic pages into static pages, and reduce load on your server. This will greatly improve load time for crucial pages.

Use a service such as CSS clean to take your CSS source and strip out white spaces, line breaks, unnecessary characters, etc.

These tips will help you shorten load times, and since Google is floating the idea of 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.