After the wake of Google‘s update to its search engine what’s been on everyone’s minds at smx (searchmarketingexpo) is page load times.

Here I will list tips and tricks you can use to optimise your site code to ensure you optimise what you have and ensure the page loads as quick as possible.

CSS

To optimise CSS is to remove all in style code and put all your CSS in one external file. This allows for one call of one file from Google. Making it easier and quicker to call on those styles and formatting you have set out for your website.

JavaScript

Like CSS there can be multiple .js files outlining exactly what you want to do for a specific section on the site. The optimum way to reduce page load time is to put all the JavaScript code into one file. This is as not as easy as the CSS as there can be conflicts. But good coding will ensure this is possible and will bring down the file size and the load times.

Remove spaces and Comments from code

Unnecessary spacing to separate code sections for readability is common practice coders use. However this slows down the code being read and is an unnecessary practice when trying to optimise for search engines.

Comments also ensure the programmer knows what section is doing what so that when they come back to it they can easily find what they need and remember what it does. However like code spacing it is unnecessary and is not optimised.

Reflection

One thing that needs to be made clear here is that this is not programmer friendly. Comments, separate CSS and JS files make it easier for programmers to separate things and be able to figure out what’s doing what. But gone are the days where we can afford to have slow loading times and useless code. Comments should be local and not live. A good programmer will be able to work round this problem and ensure all lines of code are optimised and nothing is unnecessary.

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