Unless you have been avoiding Google and all of their products you will have heard of the new algorithm (named Caffeine) that they are planning to implement after the holidays. In an interview, Google’s Matt Cutts has heavily implied that speed is going to be a huge factor in SEO. An experimental feature in Google Webmaster Tools, under the Lab link, is Site Performance. What this page shows is a graph depicting the average download speed of a website over the past few months and splitting the board into ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ – with fast being about 1.4 seconds.

There are a number of suggestions by Google on how to improve your download speed, the general feel being to make the files as small as possible and to make as few calls to the server as possible. I am going to do a series of posts with suggestions on how to make your site as fast as possible.

Reduce File Size

• There are multiple methods of reducing the time it takes to send a file from the server to the client. Gzip is a compression tool used on servers to compress files in order to save those precious kilobytes. It is the most popular and effective compression method at this time, reducing the response size by about 70%. It can be used to reduce the size of any type of file, however as images and pdf files are already compressed, it is typically best not to attempt to compress these with gzip as there may be loss of quality and can potentially increase file sizes.
• Removing unnecessary code from javascript and style sheet files will reduce the file size, thereby improving load times. Minification takes this a step further by removing all comments, new lines, tabs and spaces. This improves response time as the size of the downloaded file is reduced drastically. A popular tool for minifying javascript code and CSS is YUI compressor.

Reduce Server Calls

• Combining style sheets (and javascript files for that matter) into as few files as possible will reduce the number of calls being made to the server. Combining files is more challenging when the style sheets and scripts vary from page to page, but the improvement in response times makes it well worth the effort.
• CSS Sprites combine background images into a single image, reducing the number of image requests, and using css can show only the parts as desired using the background-image and background-position properties.

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