Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Site

July 4, 2011 - PRLog -- An easy way to improve your site is to work on your page speed. This can help with rank, boost your Google AdWords quality score, reduce your site’s bounce rate, and increase conversions. I had you at conversions, didn’t I?

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Matt Cutts stated speed may soon be one of the more than 200 signals Google uses to determine rank. While it may affect rank in the future, it does affect user behavior and revenue right now!


For example, Amazon.com made a change to their site that added 100 ms to the response time, a very small amount of time (1/10 of a second), yet they claim it resulted in a 1% decrease in sales. When Google made a change that added an extra 500 ms (half second) to response time, they claim it resulted in 20% fewer searches. If your site is not generating the fastest response times it can, you need to ask yourself, “What is this costing me?”


Over at Webmaster World, Tedster, as usual, had a great post listing Steve Souder’s 14 Best Practices for Speeding up Your Site. Have a look at the list which I’ve added below, and then I’ve added some suggestions directly following it. For more in depth detail resulting from 100 hours of testing and verifying.


1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put Stylesheets at the Top
6. Put Scripts at the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
13. Configure ETags
14. Make Ajax Cacheable


Reduce HTTP Requests


When you visit a site, your browser makes a request to the server for the images, scripts, files, page elements, etc. When the server responds to the request the data is then displayed as a web page in your browser. Each individual piece of data accounts for an HTTP request (one round trip). The more items on the page, the greater the number of requests, the slower the page speed, and the more you risk losing visitors to site abandonment.

HTTP Request



Here are a few immediate changes you can make to speed things up.

   * If you use a background image add it to your CSS file instead.
   * Optimize images by limiting the number of colors and eliminating excess white space.
   * Must all of your images be high quality? Can you make reductions in some areas without hindering the user experience?

Once images are optimized, combine them when possible. For example, do you have a lot of buttons or icons? One option would be to create an image map instead. Likewise, combine scripts when possible.


What are Content Delivery Networks?


Don’t worry about this unless you have a large network of sites. If you’re not familiar with this, the distance between a web visitor and your server’s location can affect the rate at which they receive data. Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers spread out over a geographic location. When you disperse content across multiple server locations it may improve load time.


Add an Expires Header


When someone visits your site the images are cached meaning future page views will be quicker to load because the browser already has some of the data. If you don’t give directives on how long the browser can cache the data, it may dump it automatically. That’s not good. With an Expires Header you let the browser know how long it can cache data.

Here is a quick and easy way to add Expires Header.


Gzip Compression


Don’t get too caught up Gzip Compression which is file compression. If you want to give it a try, I’ve created the Gzip mod_rewrites which you can add directly to your .htaccess file.


Stylesheet in Header


Most webmasters already do this, but verify your stylesheet (CSS ) file is linked as an external file between the header tags of your web page.







Why is placement of the stylesheet important? You want elements of the web page to start loading as soon as possible and to give the user the impression that the page is loading quickly. When you add the stylesheet to the head of the document, it renders progressively.


Put Scripts at the Bottom


While you want the stylesheet near the top of the page, JavaScript will render progressively near the bottom of the page, when possible.


Avoid CSS Expressions


These aren’t used very often, so don’t focus too much here. CSS Expressions are dynamic styles information that change on your site, for example, if you want to change the background color of your site at different hours of the day.


Make JavaScript and CSS External and Cached


When scripts and CSS are external files they are cached which you already learned means that the data is stored and future page views load faster. In contrast, when scripts and CSS are added in their entirety within the document (inline) they are downloaded each time the page is requested. If your users average a decent number of page views and each page uses the same
stylesheet and scripts, this is going to slow down page speed significantly.

Learn more about reducing DNS Lookups, how to minify JavaScript, avoiding redirects, removing duplicate scripts, configuring ETags; including many pre-written mod-rewrites for your .htaccess files.


Does site speed affect a site’s rank? Think of it this way, Google’s goal is to provide the most relevant results and a great user experience. If you have a site that is clunky and slow to load, is that a good experience? If you and a competitor have sites of similar relevance and backlinks will a faster site can give you the edge?


As a website owner, you need to constantly ask yourself, how your site, pages, files, scripts, images, etc. can be made better? Cleaner? Faster? I highly recommend you use YSlow, a development tool created by Yahoo! developers. To use it, you first need to install Firebug.

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