There may be a time when at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users as when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs.
There are some free tools that can be used to evaluate the speed of your site:
• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world
Why should one be concerned with site’s speed?
Your users’ experience in terms of navigating your site should be a great reason. Users have many options when it comes to consuming content on the internet, and a slow performing website will frustrate your users, sending them elsewhere. A faster and more responsive website will keep them more engaged and focused on your content, rather than waiting for scripts and images to load.
Another reason is for SEO. Google has announced they are using page speed in their ranking algorithm.
This means that faster performing sites may rank higher in search engine results. As developers and marketers look to optimize their sites, page speed should be among the top optimizations to consider.
Why Optimization of the code is necessary?
Server code should be optimized. It’s a start – but the code that really needs to be optimized is the user facing code. Front end optimization (of CSS, JavaScript, images, HTML, etc) is what’s going to make the most impact on your users. Often we only concentrate on server side optimizations, making the code as efficient as possible there; but we forget that we can get an even bigger speed increase if we optimize the front end code as well.
The post-analysis recommendations are not always relevant to your site (EG. You do not need a CDN if you’re running a small website or blog). This is why it’s important to truly understand the recommendations and how they can affect your site. Not everything will apply to your site.
Conclusion
Most sites include code for services like ads, analytics or other widgets. These bits of code may fetch JavaScript or CSS from other sources. Of course, since you have no control over these resources, there’s nothing you can (or need to) do.
The report organizes recommendations in order of what has the most impact on your score.
Realize that 100% is not realistic, and a green score generally means your site is speed optimized. Remember that these tools are meant to be used for a wide variety of site types, and so some recommendations may not apply to your site.
In general, there is no definitive answer one way or the other. Google has indicated they want a faster web, and to be able to “flip through sites” visually (like a magazine), which requires sites rendering fast and caching well.
“While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page.”
But don’t do it only for SEO, do it for your users!
GeeksPerHour.com will provide you SEO experts to optimize speed of your website for your users.