 We all know site speed is important and Google wants to
help you make your website
25% - 60% faster with their new
Page Speed Service.
Let’s discuss why speed is important, how to test your website, and how to make
your site run faster.
Why is Speed Important?
In April of 2010, Google Webmaster Central Blog stated they
are
using site speed in web search rankings.
Remember, Google is all about providing a better user
experience for their customers. As Google states in their article,
“Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our
internal
studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.”
However, Google also points out that while site speed is
something they are now taking into consideration, less than 1% of search queries
will be affected.
“While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the
relevance of a page.
Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal
in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors
searching in English on Google.com at this point.”
Moral of the story?
If you are still using duplicate content, your pages aren’t
relevant to what people are searching for, or you haven’t taken the time to
create really awesome unique content for your website on a consistent basis….
Don’t bother with page load times YET.
Think about this, if you want to reach #1 you need an A+.
The relevant unique consistent content on your website takes up 80% of your
grade.
Links, page speed, Meta Tags, etc make up the rest.
Content is
STILL King
and Relevancy is Queen.
How Do You Test for Speed
Rob Snell wrote an
awesome article about
Page Speed recently and used a popular tool from
Pingdom. We decided to test out our
store that we are using for the Now
What Project.
Here we see the
results of this test:
We also tested our website on
WebPageTest. Here are the
results from that test:
We click view test and get to see more information:
This site is fun but, notice the HUGE difference in
results. One said 7.9 seconds and the other said over 12 seconds.
We tested the site using
Google’s Page Speed. Here
are the results of this test:
Google says that we have a score 93 out of 100 – an A in
page speed.
Moral of the story?
No two tests are going to come out the same. Run multiple
tests and look for trends. If all 3 sites state you have a problem with the same
thing… fix the problem.
How do we make our site load faster?
Google has a REALLY interesting service about to be
released called Page Speed
Service.
“Page Speed Service is an online service to automatically speed up
loading of your web pages. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers,
rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices and serves them
to end users via Google's servers across the globe."
Having the power of
Google supporting your website may or may not be a bad thing – I am still
working this out in my head.
However, they are
stating they can help our website run faster and they have made other websites
25% - 60% faster with this service.
I signed up to be a
Beta.
Until that comes out,
we have to work on things ourselves.
Let's Optimize Those Graphics
Looking at all 3
graphs, I see that the images from my home page slide show are killing me.
So I am going to save
all those images to my computer and optimize them.
I tried 3 different
programs and wasn’t happy with the results. With
Smush It, we only reduced the
size by about 4%.
We downloaded Image Optimizer and
LOVED the results.
Our original image was
234 KB and Image Optimizer made it 23KB. SWEET!
Did we lose quality?
A little bit so let’s
change to High Quality - 34KB.
Considering we started
at 234KB – I am happy with this.
Now let’s change the
rest of the images for the slideshow, publish our site, and retest our website.
According to
Pingdom, it now takes 5.4 seconds. We trimmed 2.5 seconds just by optimizing
those 7 images in our slideshow.
According to Page Speed by Google, we went down to an 89
out of 100.
Moral of the story?
You can’t make everyone happy. The best you can do is look
for the trends, fix them, and improve your score.
What is the perfect speed or score?
Better than it was yesterday :)
Sincerely,
Shawna Seigel
(Formally Shawna Fennell but, I got married in 2010 on the Fourth of
July!)
Click To See Pictures
| 
Make sure you are subscribed to our blog! Over the next few weeks we are going to expand on each aspect we discussed above in more detail. We have lots of choices to keep up with our blog. You can subscribe to our
