After months of speculation, Google officially announced this month that a website’s search speed will factor into its algorithmic rankings. Google’s goal has always been to deliver the most relevant, latest content to someone doing a search. Site speed goes hand-in-hand with that philosophy, ensuring that the user has a good experience when interacting with a website. Being that I’m the most impatient person in the world, I agree and applaud Google for this change and encourage website owners to improve their website speed if necessary. Because who likes waiting for a page to load when browsing the web?
Our resident Sr. Programmer, Andy, had his own two cents (or should I say three) of what his typical culprits are for slow page loads:
While there are a million factors that can affect the performance of a website’s load time, here are some common issues to watch for….
- Make sure images (and Flash SWF files if your site has them) are small but still viewer friendly and optimized.
- When using JavaScript frameworks, you should always use the compressed or minified versions.
- Most important: your website hosting service needs to have fast, redundant connections to multiple Internet “backbones” or have minimal “hops” to multiple backbones. Your hosting service’s backbone is what drives traffic to your site.
Click here for the link to the official Google posting and some additional tools for helping to improve your site’s speed. And like always, if you can’t decipher the gobbly gook of website usability, we’d be happy to help you out!
