Google's recent change in its algorithm means it will look at your site's speed to determine how it will rank you in its results. It won't make much difference, content and relevance (= backlinks and keywords) are still king, but it is another factor you should consider from now on if you want to rank better in Google's search engine results. We discussed this algorithm change here.
As a response, Google has issued some guidelines how you can speed up your site without spending 1000's of dollars. A summary of these tips can be found below this video:
First of all, how do you know how fast your site performs? You can see this in Google Webmaster tools. In webmaster tools, under labs>site performance, you can see how fast your website loads, and how this compares to other websites. An example of such a graph can be seen here:
If you need a quick tutorial on how to add your site to Google Webmaster Tools you can find it here
If you see that your site performs poorly when it comes to speed, you can download the Page Speed tool and it will give you useful suggestions on how to improve your page speed.
The main tool you can use is browser and server caching. That means, allowing the server to cache the most recent version of the page so it doesn't need to exhaust its servers with each new request and allowing user's browsers to cache images and other attributes of your website, so that it doesn't need to load them with each visit. How this is done is explained in the video above, but I'd recommend you get a web developer to do this for you.
Always here when you need me. I am the forum administrator and a web designer for Clear Goal Media.
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Re:How to speed up site performance
3 years 6 days ago #2034
You can test your page speed for different regions and different countries thanks to a service provided by WebPagetest.org.
What is a good response time to aim for:
The maximum thresh hold for e-commerce sites is 2 seconds. This would be a good standard for other websites as well, but you can extend this threshold a bit if competitors don't have very fast sites (count on it that they will, though). If 2 seconds sounds long, do keep in mind that that means 2 seconds for the entire page to load. Meaning that your website might be seen immediately, but it might take 2 seconds for all the images to load. This is called progressive rendering. So if your webpage is blank for a full 2 seconds, that could actually be a really big problem. Also note that the faster your site loads, the more visitors will respond to the call to action. (Google aims to load its pages under 0.5 seconds).
Always here when you need me. I am the forum administrator and a web designer for Clear Goal Media.
The administrator has disabled public write access.
Re:How to speed up site performance
3 years 5 days ago #2045
I feel like I'm going super fast no matter what. I recently upgraded from a dinosaur with Win98 to a newbie with Win7. I feel like one of those European trains now. :}
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Re:How to speed up site performance
3 years 5 days ago #2053
