There are some major benefits to increasing the speed of your website:
- Google recently announced that your websites response and page load times are now going to be factored into your search engine rankings with them.
- Improve your visitor’s visual experience, by allowing their web browser and your server to handle and process the data in a streamlined way.
- Decreases bandwidth usage and number of simultaneous connections to the server, thus reducing your servers load, allowing you to scale your growing business needs more efficiently
- Faster webpages are proven to lower your bounce rate. If more customers stay, more may convert!
There are several online tools and browsers I use to help assist in identifying what steps I need to take in order to increase my page speed and load times.
The primary one that I use all the time is the Page Speed plugin for Firebug on Firefox, it can perform analysis on any page that you are on, and give you nearly instant details as to what needs to be done, this tool even provides you with some direct SEO tips, along the way.
The Page Speed plugin is made by Google, and it’ll even tell you “Nice job!”, if you have a high score in the mid 90’s or so, once you see that, you’ll know you’re good to go!
Now keep in mind, you absolutely must fully cross browser and user test your site while making specific enhancements, such as the combining of external JavaScript and multiple cascading style sheet (CSS) files, as some of those may need to load in a specific order, or at specific times, and could cause your pages functionality and visuals to need more work, it should not be anything major though.
Another tool I use all the time is the wonderful SmartOptimizer by Ali Farhadi, this PHP tool, allows you to give it a comma separated list of JavaScript (or CSS) files, and it will automatically place them into 1 file, minifying and gzip compressing it, such as:
Those 6 http requests, now get turned into a single line, and a single http request:
<script type="text/javascript" src="/smartoptimizer/?/js/jquery.js,core.js,ajax.js,jquery.ga.js,index_scripts.js,authslider.js"> </script>
Also, with SmartOptimizer automatically minifying and compressing the request as well, your interactive JavaScript will load faster and be available to the website visitor in a quicker time; their browser doesn’t have to wait as long to finish loading the site.
SmartOptimizer’s CSS minifier also will take small-sized images via URLs out of your CSS sheet and actually put the image data directly within the CSS file, thus even furthermore reducing the number of requests your web browser and server have to process.
I’ve seen all of these tools working together, on fairly large projects (websites) reduce the number of calls to clients servers by nearly 50%, sometimes even more, it is very beneficial to your business, customers, and servers!
Bonus Tip:
If I could only do one thing to improve site speed I would turn on gzip compression. Make sure your server admin is at least doing this because it is a major speed gain!
If you have any questions or additional comments, please respond below, thanks!
