Decrease Your Site’s Response Time
The internet's largest search engine recently announced a small but important change to its ranking algorithm. They are taking a web site's speed into account when deciding how high it will rank in the search results. This means that if there are two web sites that are equal in all other respects, the one that downloads most quickly will be shown first in the search results.
As a webmaster, what does this mean for you? You will now have to optimize your site and ensure that it does not contain any irrelevant information or graphics. Check to see whether there any content that you put on to a separate page and provide a link to that page. Remove any images that aren't necessary It is often better to provide information in plain text, rather than by using an image.
There are also some other tools and tricks that you can use to make your web site download more quickly. If you will be keeping graphics on your site, such as your logo, consider reducing their quality. Software such as Photoshop allow you to select the quality of JPEG images; consider reducing the quality of the image, which will reduce the file size. Alternatively, try changing the format of your image from a JPEG to a GIF (or vice versa). Both image formats are intended for particular types for images, and you may find that one will be smaller than the other.
If you have Javascript on your site, you may find that it is not necessary to have it there. If you have Javascript that validates information in a form, consider doing the validation after the form has been submitted.
A content delivery network (CDN) will help reduce the time taken to dowload your site. A CDN has several servers located at various points around the world. When a user requests information from your site, they will be directed to the closet server. As a result, the amount of time taken to transfer it to the user's computer will be small.
If you only have one server looking after your site, ensure that the server compresses the information before transferring it to the user. Most modern browsers are able to receive compressed files and display them as normal. Compression works particularly well on HTML and CSS files, where a small number of tags are used repetitively. If you run Apache on your own server, consider using the mod_deflate module to compress your files. If you are searching for a web hosting firm, select one that has the mod_deflate module installed; you may need to contact their helpdesk to see if they have this module.
You can prevent a user's browser from downloading files unnecessarily by adding an Expires: header to your files. If your site has any static pages or images that are unlikely to change in the near future, an Expires: header will tell the browser how long it can keep the file for. The browser will then keep a copy of the file in its cache, and will not download the file again until the date specified in the Expires: header. You can easily add an Expires: header if you have Apache installed on your own server, and you have the mod_expires module installed.
If you follow several of these steps, you will increase the speed of your site. This will hopefully have a positive effect on your rankings in the search engines.
