Improve Page Speed for better SEO

As you already know, page speed is very important signal for good SEO and there is a logic behind this – users love fast websites and probably will leave the slow ones.

Nobody have the time or the patience to wait until all pictures or java script will load on their screens. Reducing page loading time can reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates in online businesses.

If you have a “heavy” website that loading more than 2 seconds for each page, I would like to recommend a list of resources that helped me to optimize my websites. Some of my sites took more than 5 seconds to load, now the slowest one is 1.8 seconds.

First of all, it is very important to have a good server. The best value is to rent dedicated server or VPS, but if your budget is low – shared hosting is also an option.

Be careful, while choosing the right hosting company – bother to check that their servers are not too overloaded with thouthends of websites and unhappy customers.

If you already have a good server, here some tips about how to improve the speed of your website:

1. The fastest pages in the world are HTML files, so my suggest is to switch to static website, instead of using CMS.

2. Reduce the HTML output size by removing redundant spaces inside HTML tags, CSS code and Java Script.

3. Optimize images – reduce images size by editing them with simple Paint or Photoshop. There are many online tools to do it: Shrinkpictures, Resize2mail, Picresize and so on.

4. Do not overload your pages with too many images – it will slow the page load time – no more than two images in each webpage.

5. Social Widgets like Facebook, Google +1 and others may slow down your pages, so if you must use them, put the code in the bottom of the HTML code.

6. Caching – a web cache is a mechanism for the temporary storage of web documents, such as HTML pages, CSS, JavaScript and images in order to reduce bandwidth usage and server load. Make sure to enable cache for your website – it will help to serve the webpages faster.

If you are using WordPress, the best way to apply caching is to use plugins, but if you have other CMS or static website, the best way to do this is by .htaccess file or PHP.

7. The last tip is to load the navigation menus after the content – make sure to show your title and content loading first, because this is what users have been looked for – don’t make them wait.

If your website is still slower than your Grandma, use the tools bellow to speed up your pages:

1. Page Speed Check – Google Page Speed Online analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to speed up your site. Basically, I check my websites with PageSpeed check tool or FireBug page speed plugin for Firefox.

2. Test DNS server – check if its DNS servers are configured correctly and have no errors that may slow the all thing.

3. JavaScript optimizer – optimize your JavaScript code by removing comments, whitespace as well as other unnecessary characters. In other words compressing the code to smaller size.

4. CSS optimizer – optimizing CSS files. The tool helps you get smaller CSS file and better written code. The way the optimizer works actually lets you decide how much compression you want: from super compressed (unreadable ) to visually pleasing. My best practice with CSS compression is to compress the code to “visually pleasing” and delete blank lines or spaces.