08.12.2010 04:25

Since Google has clearly announced that the website’s download speed is one of the important benchmarks for site’s rating I will go over a few basics which could affect your SERPs (Search Engine Page Results). I personally think that this push for speedy websites is driven not so much by Google’s concern about web speed but by the financial considerations. Faster web will help Google to save a good chunk of money while indexing sites. Every time Google deploys a bot to index a site it takes time, although it takes a very tiny amount of time, because of the volume of indexing it all adds up and given the fact that Google’s servers consume a lot of electricity any indexing efficiency increase will result in savings to Google.

I consider these to be the major speed factors:

1. Hosting – If your hosting provider does not offer reliable high speed connection there is not much you can do about making your site faster. I have changed a few hosting providers in the past for this very reason. There are various tools which can help you to determine whether your website is speedy or “stuck in traffic”. You can easily check your website download speed with Google Webmaster Tools.

   If you are using a shared hosting, some of your server neighbors may hog most of the bandwidth and that will result in a substantial slowdown of your web pages performance. Let’s say they have launched a large scale email campaign and they are streaming video from their website. Most likely this will result in a substantial slow down of your web pages load time. That’s why you have to monitor your server traffic performance using your preferred software tools and if necessary talk to your hosting provider.

2. Images – Use proper compression techniques while saving images for the web. This is an old outdated topic but the truth is that most websites using wrong types of compression all the time. It all comes down to reducing the image file size picking between .png, .jpg or .gif formats when saving your images for the web.

   Try not to slice images. Image slicing technique came from the old times when web designers were confided to web page layouts based on tables, and were slicing images to fit different table cells. Now with tableless layout methods and CSS there is no need to slice images. The problem with image slicing is this: user’s browser has to download each and every slice separately and that takes additional time. When designing a web page consider how many requests will be sent to a server to download all elements.

3. HTML Code – Do not use tables for layouts, use them for data display, that’s what they originally are designed for. Also, avoid nesting tables inside tables, that takes additional download and rendering time, not to mention could result in bot’s failure to index page properly.

   Externalize all java scripts, except for the small snippets. Externalize all styling elements.

   Avoid white spaces between the code lines. This is an issue with most blog templates were generated HTML looks like spider web with a huge gaps in between. Same goes for external CSS files.

   When using CSS, avoid multiple declarations for the same element, this will help you to reduce the size of your styling documents. Also, if a page is using different layout with many unique styling elements, create a separate style sheet. For example, index page can use index.css where article page can use article.css and so forth.

   You can use html code compression through gzip or other methods.

4. Website Structure and Technologies – Keep your website structure flat avoiding additional subdirectories if possible. Deep directory structures are not search engine bot friendly and also may reduce download speed. If you are running a database, it is very important to configure it properly especially if you use re-directing to a single domain name. Same concerns shopping carts, blogs, forums and other applications. Therefore be vigilant when selecting a WordPress template or a shopping cart for your website. Too many widgets, conflicting code, broken strings, all of these are affecting website download speed.

   Same goes for Flash websites, they usually take longer to load not to mention are more difficult to be indexed if not properly optimized. It’s ok to use flash elements on your site but for the sake of performance use them sparingly.

   I don’t think that media files will affect rankings if properly embedded in the web page. Some of the development software generates large chunks of embedded code to ensure browser compatibility. I think it is better to manually define which style sheet of media type to display using browser declaration techniques.

These are major points of consideration when faced with your website speed performance. If you are a web developer, you probably have your methods but whether we like it or not, it looks like we will have to pay more attention to a speed factor thanks to the latest Google demand.

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