Speeding your page load time will improve your Google ranking.
It is now official. Speeding up a site’s page delivery will be beneficial for each page’s ranking in the the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). So speed is now a ranking factor at Google. This has been officially announced on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.
Satisfied users.
If you still haven’t grasped the concept: Google has always emphasized that it liked pages made for users and not for search engines. A faster loading page means a satisfied user and as Google has all to win when it concerns satisfied users it is using what satisfies them, fast pages, as a ranking tool. Now, those having never seen the usefulness of Google Webmaster Tools can start running there to open their accounts.
How to?
There are some simple ways of improving a site’s speed. First things first, use pingdom tools to evaluate your page’s load time. What I like with this new factor is that web designers will have to go back to the basics, re-use the core of web design coding, i.e. writing standards based code.
Standards.
Great day for standards. Using semantic and clean code will definitely help improve a page’s loading time. Using basic and clean tags will help your pages load in a whizz. Make sure you do not use deprecated tags and keep to your document definition (strict, transitional…etc.). Moreover, when using standards you get yourself a step ahead in optimising your code as the latter is easily maintained and you can just get any other coder to dive into your page to optimise it.
With the use of standards, you are bound to reduce the number of lines of code you would have originally used. Thus, pages are lighter and load time is decreased. All benefits!
External CSS.
Using standards implies the separation of presentation and content. This is done through the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and, more important, the use of external CSS. This also has an impact on your page load time. Why? Having all CSS in one external file means that the file will load only once (on the first page a site is visited) then, the same file is used by the browser to load all the other pages’ presentation. This means that your site’s pages will load faster as the CSS will be read only once and you will not have duplicate code to maintain all the time in each page if your CSS is written in them.
To get the most out of your CSS in terms of load time you can also improve the CSS file itself. Check out a previous article on how you can make pages load faster by minimising the CSS file.
External behaviour.
Should you be having behaviour on your pages (be they through Java or DOM scripting), the same advice as that for CSS goes. You need to externalise all the code to one external page to avoid constant recalls to all your functions each time a page is loaded. You can also think about progressive enhancement to improve the page loading when scripts are not activated or fail to load. All in all, keeping these simple and short will help improve your page loading capabilities. Other enhancements include the loading of all scripts after the content.
More…
These here are some simple examples on how the code can help pages in improving in terms of load times. It is very important to take these into consideration at the beginning of a project to maximise its ROI. This is a great example on how code and coding strategies can improve SEO, and Google is now making use of it.
You can push further in the ways a page’s load time can be improved for example, the choice of your server or image optimisation strategies.
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Category: General, Search Engine Optimisation, Standards and code
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Interesting tips, as usual.
But I would like to ask your opinion on something (not exactly out of topic thought)
To be able to use google analytics, I think that it is necessary to include that code into your site/blog. On a few times I noticed that my site slowed down a bit while calling the code (status bar showing : waiting for http://www.google.com) etc.
For example, in my photoblog, my lightbox won’t work until the site is completely loaded. Since the google analytics code is still executing, this prevents my users from viewing the pictures in a lightbox.
Any solutions or alternatives to this or may be I did it wrong? Thanks in advice.
Thanks Yashvin.
The Google Analytics code is known for being really slow. You should first make sure that it doesn’t load at the beginning of your page, having it at the end of the code (just before the </html>) will improve page speed. There’s a lot of Javascript on your photoblog also and some clashes might occur. The best solution you have though is to set your Google Analytics code to load through the DOM, meaning that it will load your whole page completely before loading the Google Analytics code.
Check the tutorial on how to do this here.
.-= Web Design Mauritius´s last blog ..Speeding your page load time will improve your Google ranking. =-.
Thnks for ur advice
Will try that later on and see if there’s any improvement. Cheers!
This is one thing I really need to work on my site. Well, during the holiday I am planning a relook of the site with a new design and also more optimisation.
I’ve noticed that you’ve not been very active over the last month.
Its a good thing to take such issues into consideration when redesigning your website. It might help it get more trafic through better ranking. Hope to see a new version soon.
.-= Web Design Mauritius´s last blog ..Dropping unnecessary tags in your HTML code. =-.
Thanks for pointing this out – it’s something we’ve sort of known was half true for a long time, good to see acknowledgment from G.
I have noticed that pulling in ads from multiple third party sources can greatly influence a page’s load time. This is very apparent on some blogs that use widgets and applets that feed ads or third party content.
Welcome here for your first comment Martin.
Can I suspect you to be who I think you are?
You are right on for third party content generation. This is why a lot of work has to be done in the code. Here for example, I have reduced a lot the number of plugins and widgets. The blogroll appears only on the homepage and the Adsense ads are thrown in directly through a PHP function. It is also loaded after the content. I’ve also thrown out the Twitter widget. For sure, if one really needs to speed a page more than this blog’s load time it entails the removal of a lot of these.
Cheers for your comment.
.-= Web Design Mauritius recently wrote: Google MAYDAY update is affecting long tail keyword rankings. =-.
Great post for those who want to know how to take advantage of this with their webpages.
People should also think about having javascript load last, merging javascript and css and also Gzip compressing your site. Gzip alone could half your website’s load times.
There are various plugins that do that for you if you use a CMS like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal
Thanks for these additions Justin. Server management and the way the pages are delivered to the browser are real advantages to speeding up a page’s load time.
.-= Web Design Mauritius recently wrote: Custom Search: make the most out of Google Maps with optimized geolocation results =-.
I don’t know anything about coding or designing, but this is quite interesting and I’ll discuss it to my designer.. thanks…..
Well, hope that he can help you improving your page load times. Cheers.