Tweak Your WebSite Load Time

This post was written by Internet Marketing John on June 22, 2010
Posted Under: Website Usability

Tweak your website load time if you intend to improve your ranking in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages.

Google has been using your website load time as a factor in where they place your site in the SERPs for quite some time.

Basically, the time that it takes your website to load, can directly affect your search engine rankings.

The fact that Google provides tips on their blog that show you how to decrease the amount of time it takes for your content to load, in itself indicates the weight they place on website load times.

One way to substantially speed up your website, especially if it is a big huge site, is to use a CDN network.

CDN networks, or Content Delivery Networks, are Networks of highly optimized servers located throughout the world, that work together to distribute your web site’s content through hundreds of servers, instead of just a single host server. This ensures that each visitor to your site can get data from the city that is closest to them.

CDNs will substantially decrease the website load time for CSS, Javascript files, downloadable objects, applications, streaming media, and other type data.

Your header file can use up a surprisingly large amount of CDN bandwidth.

You can tweak your website load time by simply compressing the file in Photoshop or some other photo editing software, to drop down the file size.

Changing the file format of your other smaller theme files from .png to .jpg, will also speed up your load time. PNG files eat up bandwidth, and when you edit the files down to a transparent background and reload them as .jpg files, you can save even more resources.

Using a CDN will drastically cut down on the bandwidth you use through your web hosting company and will allow more traffic during peak periods without taxing your existing resources.

You can download a free Firefox add on called Firebug, that will tweak your website load time by analyzing the code on your site, and show you where improvements can be made from a web standard and load time perspective.