Blog Tipz

Website speed is important, no matter what type of online business or blog you run. Typically, you want to optimize all your images and pages to load as fast as possible. The more page views you can garner from each visitor, the more of a chance they have of making further actions on your site – purchasing products, leaving comments, or increasing the value for advertisers.

Google is working on trying to “make the web faster,” and have outlined some new tools available for webmasters. Some of them are quite common with what Yahoo has offered, but are still welcome as an alternative. It is likely that they are trying to promote this in order to reduce their costs, too.

Because a majority of blogs running WordPress are using “shared” hosting, it is sometimes difficult to optimize your site properly. There is only so much one can do to optimize the code and settings before pages begin returning errors due to the inability to run certain compression methods.

If you go to the Webmaster Central area, you are now able to see how fast your pages load, how they’ve fared over time, and how your site’s load time compares to that of other sites. You can see an example form this site below.

It is reporting that the site takes 9.6 seconds to load (slower than 92% of sites). Additionally, several of the main pages are displayed below this, and some basic suggestions.

As you can see from the image, page speed has increased, but work still needs to be done. I’ve been using several different forms of compression plugins and integrated several forms of optimization, but the next step would be to purchase a more powerful hosting plan, which really isn’t feasible for a “significant” number of users.

Moving into 2010, I don’t know how much of SEO optimization will be for faster-loading pages. Naturally, the sites that have faster servers will get higher placement because Google, or any search engine for that matter, is able to index their pages faster, while those with less traffic/lower-powered servers will get slightly lower rankings.

Key Tips for Optimizing Your Site

Although many of these can also be found on the Yahoo! Developer Page, they are also generally accepted as the best for decreasing page loading times.

1. Use Image Maps instead of using multiple images.
2. CSS Sprites are great for small background images that need to load quickly, as they can be combined into one image.
3. Combine Files so your HTTP requests load at one time, rather than separately.
4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) if you are publishing a lot of images/multimedia as the CDN will serve them from distributed locations rather than one main server location.
5. Use Caching to reduce the number and size of HTTP requests.
6. Compress Components to deliver pages that decrease the file size. However, it can also increase CPU usage if not done properly.
7. Put Stylesheets at the Top in order to have the “look” of the site load as quickly as possible.
8. Put Scripts at Bottom as scripts often block parallel downloads.
9. Make JavaScript and CSS External because the JavaScript and CSS files will be cached by the browser.
10. Reduce DNS Lookups because the browser can’t download anything from a particular hostname until the DNS lookup has completed (20-120 milliseconds).
11. Avoid Redirects as it adds time and distracts the visitor from seeing the intended site for a few seconds.

Conclusion

What do you think these changes mean in the SEO world, and what techniques have you been using (or plan to use) to speed up your website? While page loading time certainly is important, I feel that there is only so much you can do, and it is more important on sites that require page reloads (e-commerce) rather than content-based sites.