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Page Speed – A Slow Website Makes Work for Idle Visitors

Posted on March 28th, 2010 in Search Engine Optimisation, Website Management & Improvement.
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Getting the search engines to take more notice of your website is getting more and more difficult with more competition appearing day on day – not to mention the amount of spam and dodgy techniques people use to get the major search engines to take notice of their site. Because of this, Google are looking at other ways they can tell if a site is worth sending visitors to or not.

Page speed is one area that is often overlooked. A faster site gives a better user experience. A slow site frustrates and annoys visitors. If you can do everything you can to make your site as user friendly as possible this will surely show Google that you are keen to make your site better for everyone and offer a better user experience possible.

As other site’s fail to keep up you’ll be rising up ahead of the ‘lazies’ and getting brownie points from both your visitors and the search engines and you may find yourself slowly out-ranking them and getting more visitors from it. And your visitors won’t mind coming back – bonuses all round.

Some tips on making your site load faster:

  • Make sure you strip out out unnessary comments in your code (bits of code that are there for reference and don’t appear in your browser – only in the code)
  • Remove any styling code (CSS) that isn’t used anywhere in the site
  • Optimise all of your images to make the file sizes smaller
  • Validate your HTML and CSS
  • Remove any inline Javascript or CSS (in the page itself) and put into external files
  • Load any images from your own hosting account/server instead of image sharing websites or other external sites (if they become slow or go down, it will affect your site’s performance)
  • Don’t use any unnecessary scripts that don’t contribute to the quality of the site or user experience

Page Speed from Google (free) is a great tool that details any areas of your site that could be optimised for a quicker load speed. Also see Pingdom’s full page test tool (free) to test your site and see what might be causing your site to load slower than it should.

Another tip is to give your visitors what they want in as few clicks as possible. If they want a download, let them have it. They aren’t going to root around a slow website for long to find the latest remix of Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

If you have anything to add in bettering the user experience or making a website faster or if you use any tools that have helped you please comment below.

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/
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Published by Ashley

Please note: I don't claim to have all the answers and here on my blog I can only give you ideas and suggestions from my own knowledge and experience within my own niche. Since I know very little about what you do exactly and can only cover a number of angles in each post, if you you can add anything please do so for the benefit of our reader in a comment - I'd be most grateful.

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Music Marketing UK Blog Owner
Welcome to my Music Marketing blog. I have been actively involved with online promotion for many years now, both professionally and in my spare time, and being an active musician for the best part of 9 years I felt I needed to share my knowledge and experience with those that would be most appreciative and could put it to good use.

My aim here is to combine the two areas into manageable chunks and present tips, ideas and inspiration for anyone wanting to promote their music online and offline and generally get one foot above the rest, set themselves apart from the average and achieve what they want to achieve musically. I'm hoping the information I post here can help you do just that.

Read about how I can help you market your own music.