Google is constantly checking your site’s performance and all indications point to this being a ranking factor in future. This was reported a late last year by WebProNews, after an interview with the venerable Matt Cutts from the Google team.

By their own admission Google is all about the ”user experience”, with their prime SEO mantra being; “make websites for users, not for the search engines”. And page load time is one if the most important user experience issues that you’ll encounter when browsing the web.  Google wants to serve it’s users with they what they want.  Do they want slow page websites at the top of their search results?  or do they want a page that loads instantly and gives them the information they’re seeking straight away.    Obviously, the latter.

It’s a well known “statistic” that if a web page does not load in less than 3 seconds a user will ”bounce” from the site, return to the search results and probably pick one of your competitors.  Which begs the question:  how can you speed up a slow site?

Examine your site’s performance

First off, you should analyze all information available about how your pages load using some readily available tools. As a good SEO or webmaster you’ve probably already signed up for Google’s Webmaster Tools.   A recently added feature is the “Site Performance” section, which is found under the “Labs” menu item.

This will give you a general indication of whether Google sees your site as being fast or slow, and provides a few tips on how your pages can be improved for speed.   You can also see over time how your work in improving web site speed is taking effect.

For a more immediate read-out of a webpage’s performance I also use the Yahoo YSlow plugin for Firebug (a Firefox plug-in). YSlow can be run on a live page that you are viewing and gives instant (depending on page load time of course), feedback on what areas you can address to improve load time on your website.   It will also give you an indication of the “emtpy cache” (first time visitor) and “primed cache” (repeat visitor) performance.

For an advanced metric of page load time, Google Analytics can be configured to record a page load time metric and gives a reasonable representation of the issue from the user perspective.   Analytics can be made to track the load time based on internet connection speed in so giving a broad indication of your site’s performance.

Enable GZip Compression

All modern browsers support webpage GZip compression and are able to decompress the data sent from your server.  The less data that is transferred for each page, the less time it takes for a page to load in a browser.  For those site owners who have a restriction on the amount of traffic with their host, GZip compression will reduce the amount of data that you have to serve.

You can use a GZip compression test to check if your pages are currently compressed and if not, this tool will estimate of the size of savings to expect.   If GZip compression is enabled, the actual % of data saved during compression is shown.  This tool can also test CSS and JS files.

Apache and Microsoft IIS web servers both support GZip, and quick and dirty instructions for enabling GZip compression is shown below:

Apache Server

The module that deals with GZip compression on an Apache server is “mod_deflate”. Create an “info.php” file and add the code <?php phpinfo() ?>, upload to your server and browse “/info.php” to get a readout of the Apache modules installed.  If mod_deflate is loaded on your webserver then the following .htaccess declaration will enable GZip for a lot of file types.

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/javascript application/x-javascript application/x-httpd-php application/rss+xml application/atom_xml
</IfModule>

If mod_deflate can’t be loaded by your host or server admin (it requires a core recompile for installation) then the following .htaccess declaration will enable GZip compression for php files only. The “gzhandler” is not as efficient at compressing data than “mod_deflate”, so will be marginally slower and the savings will me slightly less but for most sites will suffice.

php_value output_handler ob_gzhandler

If your pages are .htm or .html (as opposed to .php) add the following lines at the top of your .htaccess to get Apache to parse those files as .php so that they will be compressed.

RemoveHandler .html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html

Microsoft IIS

If you’re running a Microsoft IIS server, the following document will explain how compression can be activated: http://g.www.ms.akadns.net/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/25d2170b-09c0-45fd-8da4-898cf9a7d568.mspx?mfr=true

Reduce Image Size

These days websites are very graphicy, with most sites having appealing header images, product images and so forth.  Unfortunately the more graphics on a site, the more data needs to be sent to the user’s browser leading to longer load times.  This is especially an issue for first time visitors who don’t have the images cached.

Most competent web designers keep this in mind and will try to maximize the Jpeg compression versus the image quality to speed up page loading.  But there are some cool tools out there that can further improve things like this.  Even using gif’s and png’s instead of jpegs will make a difference as they tend to use less k’s is size.

One of the most useful image tools that we use is SmushIt (found in the YSlow plugin that is mentioned earlier in this post). SmushIt is able to examine the images on a web page and compress them even further with no noticeable degradation in image quality. Smushing your header and background images is a must, and the data savings are often surprising.

One of the big no-no’s that we often come across is using the browsers image scaling to fit a large image into a small space.  We often find this is the case in product catalogs, when a large product image is used for the shingle thumbnail on the category listing pages.  In this case, use a small thumbnail in the shingle instead of scaling.

For all other cases browser image scaling should be avoided, as the web browser is slow at scaling, not to mention the extra time spent downloading the large image. Always  ensure images are scaled to the correct size before use on your pages, and you’ll notice an improvement in load time.

If your website template uses a lot of background images, header images and image buttons  then the number of HTTP requests for a webpage will be quite high. Each request takes time and can slow down a page. To reduce this delay combine these template images into a CSS sprite image. This is basically one “big” image that contains all of your template images and using CSS classes you can pick out the correct part of this image that you need for each of the graphic elements on the page.

CSS and JavaScript Code

There are a few strategies for improving CSS and JavaScript file load time.  At a minimum you should externalize all CSS and JS files so that they can be cached by the users browser.  In addition, if you have more that one CSS or JS include file, combine all the CSS includes into one file, do the same with the JS includes, and this will reduce http requests.  For the hardcore guys out there, try to Minify the CSS/JavaScript which will remove unnecessary white-space and line-breaks. Minify can be also found in the YSlow plugin for Firebug.  And no, I don’t sell Firebug or Yslow (based on how many times I’ve mentioned it) – it’s just a cool plug in.

Reduce the amount of database calls in your application

A lot of websites out there rely on an SQL database to store information that is shown to your users.  If your site runs a product catalog or a CMS systems then the odds are that a database is involved.  Every time a page is requested by a browser, the database is queried for the information that the user will see on the page.  This back and forth takes time and can be a bottleneck.

To speed things up, only run the minimum database queries that are required and only request the actual table fields from the database that you need. Avoid “SELECT * FROM” in your SQL queries.   Optimizing things in this way can get quite quite knarly, so be prepared for a lot of hard work. For large sites that get a lot of traffic this can help in page load time tremendously and is worth the effort.

Wordpress

Wordpress is the most popular blogging software out there, and due to it’s flexibility is increasingly being used as a CMS system. Wordpress uses an SQL database to store all your posts and pages.

Hundreds of “plug-ins” are available for Wordpress to help customize it in countless ways.  Unfortunately the more plugins that you install, the slower Wordpress becomes.  The less plugins that are activated the faster your Wordpress blog will be.  You should also go as far as removing all unactivated wordpress plugins from your “plugin” directory.

A useful addition to Wordpress are “Widgets”, which allow for “real time updated” areas within your template. There are Widgets available to show latest posts, most popular posts, dynamic menus and much more.  The problem is that each one of these widgets will poll the database to get the information required, thus increasing the load time of the page.  Try to reduce the number of widgets that you use and if a widget is showing content that doesn’t change too often, try to hardcode the HTML with what the widget would display.

Summary

There are many more things to look at to speed up a website and those listed above are the areas that I initially tend to look at for my search engine optimisation clients. Depending on the size of a site and the amount of traffic it gets, even the simplest change can have a significant effect.

If there are any other ways you have found to speed up a site, I’d love to know of your experiences.

Also known as ‘Spiders’, ‘Crawlers’ and the ‘Googlebot’, these programs scrawl the internet constantly, from page-to-page, site-to-site, reading the content on the page and reporting back to Google and other search engines about what your site is about and what keyword or phrases would be relevant to display your site in it’s results.

Every day hundreds of them go out and scour the web, whether it’s Google trying to index the entire web, or a spam bot collecting any email address it could find for less than honorable intentions.  As site owners, what little control we have over what robots are allowed to do when they visit our sites exist in a magical little file called “robots.txt.”

“Robots.txt” is a regular text file that through its name, has special meaning to the majority of “honorable” robots on the web. By defining a few rules in this text file, you can instruct robots to not crawl and index certain files, directories within your site, or at all. For example, you may not want Google to crawl the /images directory of your site, as it’s both meaningless to you and a waste of your site’s bandwidth. “Robots.txt” lets you tell Google just that.

For my readership (because I love each and every one of you), I have included below a generator to create a robot.txt file to upload and use on your own sites:

Robots.txt Generator Tool © SEO Chat™       Allowed User Agent Select user agent or use default for all agents All AgentsAlexa AgentAltaVista AgentAOL Netfind/Excite AgentGoogle AgentHotBot AgentInfoSeek AgentLycos AgentMSN Search CrawlerNorthern Lights AgentWebcrawler Agent Enable All Webpages Yes No – Exclude These URL’s: ¦lt;br /> Enter URLs you wish to exclude /cgi-bin/<br /> /images/ Enter Captcha To Continue To prevent spamming, please enter in the numbers and letters in the box below Report Problem with Tool.

1) Create a website business plan that integrates nicely with your overall marketing objectives; the content should be consistent with any offline materials (leaflets, posters, business cards), the graphics/images should be web friendly and consistent with your overall branding; same colours, fonts, basically, everything that makes your website ‘recognisable’ as a brand.

2) When creating a website, try not to get “geek crazy” – meaning you become so in love with the latest design technology, your web site gets bogged down with heavy graphics, add-on software and components, GIF animated image/tacky crap, etc. But, conversely, check your ego at the door when you work at your design. There are too many sites cramped with meaningless junk they literally turn visitors away.  A decent, clean design is what you typically need.  Keep it ‘fresh’.

3) Pay attention to your website’s “load times,” i,e. how long it takes a web site to load on the worst-case scenario: a 56 kbps modem (this is an industry average and some users will still be using this – even in today’s broadband world).  If its more than 12-18 seconds, you may experience the “click of death” – the site doesn’t load quickly and the surfer is gone… forever.   Of course if you are targeting broadband customers who are reaching your site via ISDN, DSL or Cable modem then you can build a website that incorporates multimedia-ready content that may include streaming audio or video, Shockwave or Flash capabilities.

4) Keep it simple – make a website easy to navigate, build an efficient menu structure that is consistent with industry standards.

5) Your visitors should be able to get to their desired area of your site within one or two mouse clicks; they will quickly get frustrated if they have to click around multiple menus to get to the page that they are seeking.

6) Develop content that is web-friendly.  People don’t read text on websites like they do in any other offline media. Keep paragraphs short ( no more than three or four sentences) and put in white space between your content, include links in your pages as well to other areas of your site as well.  this not only steers people across your site, but also helps with seo.

7) Make your site User-friendly.   Don’t use white backgrounds with yellow text, don’t have tiny, tiny writing.  This page is about the limit (I personally love this size, but the majority of people don’t).  Also bear in mind people who are colour-blind or visually impaired – can they still use your site efficiently?   Will they be able to actually see anything on your site?

8. Optimise your website for Search Engines by researching about 8-12 keywords that people will use to find your site from Google etc, then incorporate these keywords actually within your site content (to drive relevancy with search engine spiders/bots) and then get lots of links to your site (also known as ‘backlinks’.  It is estimated as much as 70% of all traffic to most web site comes through a search engine of some sort – mainly Google, Yahoo and Aol.

9) Check  into your log server files regularly to uncover “tracking” made through your website – your log files are raw data that show how and from, where people located  your website, where they went within your web site, how long they stayed there for, etc.  There are many products on the market that can achieve such purpose, such as Google Analytics.   With Google, you would simply sign up with Google for free, they then give you some god to add into the pages and it does all the reportig for you.

10) Think global, not local - in your overall site design.  Always think that the greatest Internet growth is occurring outside where you live, so it is essential to build a site that can be accessed easily by people anywhere around the world – assuming that the content can be useful for anyone.   You may also want to make your web site content readily available in diverse languages as well (especially if e-commerce), so your website can be utilized by all.

Hope you find this as useful as I did.   It may seem common sense, but it’s easy to forget one or more of the important factors.

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