Is Your Website Slowing You Down?

As I am sure you will already know, Google has begun using your website load speed and performance as one of the many ranking factors currently considered when placing your website in the SERPS.

How Will This Affect You?

According to a blog post by Matt Cutts we are told we shouldn't panic and that only a small amount of searches and search results will actually be affected by the change, in fact  only around 1% of the search queries will change as a result. In the grand scheme of things though, 1% is a big portion when you consider the amount of searches which take place through Google on a month by month basis.

Is This As Bigger Deal As It Sounds?

Probably not, but then that's just my opinion, I certainly don't think it's something you need to loose any sleep over but I do think it's something you should take into account when you are building your sites in the future, but even then it doesn't have to be a major headache, just include this as part of your normal on page SEO process. For your current sites it's certainly worth going through them and identifying where you can make improvements in the near future, I've started with my higher traffic sites and this blog  in particular and  I will be looking for ways and methods to optimize their loading time. Mark at the Niche Store Builder is also doing the same and will be posting his progress over on his blog.

Is This A Bad Thing?

It would be very easy for me to sit here and verbally bash Google for making yet another change, simply from the POV that it's creating more work for me, but then that would be incredibly short sighted of me! Speaking as a general Internet user and not as an Affiliate Marketer/Webmaster/Internet Marketer I like websites to load their content quickly and no matter how much it may gripe you to admit it, I'm sure you do too, the last thing you want when you are looking for something online is to have to wait half a minute for the website to load. The world is in a rush, people want everything yesterday... and that's a fact! Website loading speed is a fundamental aspect of web design, just as using valid HTML and CSS markup is, so surely this can only be a good thing if it gives webmasters the kick up the ass they need to optimize their sites better.

So How Can You Start To Optimize?

If you have your sites listed in Google webmaster tools then you can head over to your account and under 'Labs' and 'Site Performance'  in the navigation you can check the overall loading and performance of your site, your aim is to get your site out of the red and into the green, something I'm currently trying to achieve.

One tool in particular which Google recommend you can use to analyze your websites loading time and overall performance is the Page Speed Addon For Firefox, to use this tool you must have Firebug Addon installed as well (read more about Firebug in this previous post). With one click of a button you get a page score out of 100 telling you where your site is 'falling down' and the best ways to improve it. I started by checking out my blog first of all as I knew it wasn't as well optimized as it could be, my home page analysis was 73/100, I have now managed to improve this to 82/100 just by adding a couple of WordPress plugins I use on some of my higher traffic niche sites.

Ways To Optimize Your Website

Over the next few weeks I'll aim to build a list of methods and tools I have used to optimize my own sites. As I mentioned above, Mark is also keeping a list of the tools and techniques he uses to optimize his own sites so it will be worth you keeping an eye on his list as well.

Tools So Far..

WordPress Super Cache - This plugin enables you to take advantage of browser caching, something that you may find a lot of your sites fall down on.

WordPress Minify - On a couple of my own sites I've found the recommendation to 'minify' my HTML as well as combine external JS and CSS files, WordPress Minify takes care of some of this for you.

How are your own websites performing and what tools and techniques have you used so far on your own websites?

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