One of the primary new focuses of the Google Caffeine update is page load times, and taking a websites speed into consideration with their ranking algorithms. One tip to a successful website is the speed at which it loads. None of your visitors will want to be hanging around waiting for the page to load because it’s bloated or not optimised. Fortunately there are lots of ways you can reduce page load time, and a lot of them are basic common sense rules that any web developer should be following.
Optimise the file size of images by reducing their colour palette and/or quality.
Reduce the number of requests the browser needs to make to the web server by combining CSS, JavaScript, and where possible, images.
Remove unnecessary bloat from the websites code.
Keep the file size all elements on a single page to no more than a total of 200KB.
Choose a good quality hosting service where you can be sure the servers are not overloaded.
A study several years ago by Akamai found that on average around 75% of visitors would close a website before it had finished loading, if it had not done so within 4 seconds of typing the URL and clicking ‘go’. When asked, 30% of those visitors said their opinion of the company would be “negative” if their website was badly put together and/or slow.
Google Caffeine is set to start putting their new algorithms into practice in 2010, and Webmaster Tools already has a Site Performance monitor to show you how long your page load times are. It shows a graph with each plot on it, an average load time compared with other sites on the web, and suggestions on how to improve the load time. Now would be a good time to make sure your site is as optimised as it can be.
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