As part of Site Clinic series with the two blog posts, we have addressed the top four trends - canonicalization, duplicate content, alt attribute for describing images & Sitemaps. While reviewing websites that were submitted through this event, we noticed slow page load time to be another major trend. Load time is the time taken for a web page to open completely in the user’s browser.
In lieu of the recent announcement about site speed being used as a ranking factor, we thought we will end this series with a post on how to make the your websites faster.
Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. Ultimately, if the load time of a web page is decreased, it will make for a better user experience. There are several free tools available on web to evaluate the page speed. One such Google tool is the open source Firefox/Firebug add-on called Page Speed which helps webmasters to assess the speed of a web page by generating results on the basis of our best practices.
http://www.royalchemists.com/ is a chemist’s website with a neat layout. The content clearly conveys a message that they are in business for a very long time and has customer testimonials on home page itself, which is a value add. Page Speed score for the home page when we reviewed was 78/100, which is a decent Page Speed. Let us discuss few parameters of the Page Speed results that this page scored well and what to be improved on.
In lieu of the recent announcement about site speed being used as a ranking factor, we thought we will end this series with a post on how to make the your websites faster.
Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. Ultimately, if the load time of a web page is decreased, it will make for a better user experience. There are several free tools available on web to evaluate the page speed. One such Google tool is the open source Firefox/Firebug add-on called Page Speed which helps webmasters to assess the speed of a web page by generating results on the basis of our best practices.
http://www.royalchemists.com/ is a chemist’s website with a neat layout. The content clearly conveys a message that they are in business for a very long time and has customer testimonials on home page itself, which is a value add. Page Speed score for the home page when we reviewed was 78/100, which is a decent Page Speed. Let us discuss few parameters of the Page Speed results that this page scored well and what to be improved on.
This page scores well on the following parameters
What can be improved?
Please have a look at the waterfall-view for http://www.royalchemists.com/ that we did using http://www.webpagetest.org/ .
- Minimizing the round-trip times (RTTs)
- CSS placement
What can be improved?
Please have a look at the waterfall-view for http://www.royalchemists.com/ that we did using http://www.webpagetest.org/ .
This page uses lots of images as icons which will slow down the page while loading on browser. Using CSS image Sprites would help the page to reduce the number of HTTP requests and increase the page speed.
In addition, compressing the below components with gzip will help reduce the HTTP response time:
- http://www.royalchemists.com/
- http://www.royalchemists.com/style.css
- http://www.royalchemists.com/menus.js
This web page can score more by adding a far future expires header to the static components like image file components. It means setting up an expiration date in future for the resources to be cached will help browser fetch and use the cached version when page is loading after the first run.
Check this video on the post of Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead from our team, who talks about the need for the page speed and how to add Expires header.
We hope this blogpost will encourage webmaster look into ways to speed up their website and in turn the overall speed of the web.
Check out this video of Matt Cutts, a Webspam Engineer from our team, who clarified if page speed is a critical factor in ranking or not. You can read more about Site performance on our Webmaster Help Center and also can use the webmaster tool feature called Site performance which will give site performance statistics.
With this blogpost we would like to conclude our current Site Clinic series and we would like to thank you all profusely for making this a great success.
Posted By Search Quality Team.
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