Do you see a visible delay in your websites page load times? Even worse, do you find yourself tapping your fingers as the pages of your website load? If so, then you’re dead when the Google Caffiene algorithm goes live after the 2009 holiday season. This isn’t conjecture or my opinion. Matt Cutts, Google’s spokesman has made this clear.
Page load times are a critical addition to the 2010 Google Caffeine page ranking algorithm.
Page load time is the time it takes for your page to fully render in a browser after it is requested. Page load time is important to your search engine rankings, SEO and website usability. Many of the sites I analyze have focused solely on aesthetics and in so doing have left out many of the website features important to their success. Page load time is one of them.
Consider the following, if it takes 5 minutes to load the content of your web page, do you think the search engines will stick around to grab your content? Don’t think so. So, how long do you expect the search engines to wait around to extract the content from your page before they leave to the next web page? Search engines don’t publish these numbers. I can tell you this though: If it takes less than 2 seconds to load your entire page then you’re probably safe. If it takes 10, 20 seconds or more then don’t be surprised if you aren’t found in the search engines at all. This knowledge comes from measuring the load times of the sites we analyze and build, and their search engine ranking success.
The usability factor is, current wisdom says that if your website visitors aren’t convinced that they are at the right site within 5 – 8 seconds then they’re gone. The page load time usability factor directly affects sales and conversions.
Google has recently included page load time in its landing page Quality Score for their Adwords campaigns. Pay attention to it.
So, how do you speed up your page loads?
Fortunately there are great tools to measure page load times and a solid list of techniques to speed up your page loads.
To measure and make accurate decisions on speeding up your page loads these tools are must-haves:
* IBM Page Detailer – it’s a Windows desktop app. An online tool to create similar charts can be found at:
http://www.uptrends.com/aspx/free-html-site-page-load-check-tool.aspx
* YSlow Plugin for Firefox – this great tool requires that you first download and install the Firebug javascript tool (on the same page). YSlow was created by Steve Souders of Yahoo. He also wrote the book:
* High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers
* Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction
If you are interested in the subject of this blog post then you’ll definitely be interested in using Firebug. More on that later.
Here is an example of the charts that the IBM Page Detailer creates:
It shows a row for each item (image, CSS file, html file, flash object, etc.) loaded in your page and shows how much time it takes to load each object.
There is an item to note in the above diagram. It is the page load time of our home page. The Navy Blue objects are images loaded from our servers. On most sites only 2 can load at a time, but we have tweaked the site architecture so more than 2 can load at a time. This alone speeds up load times to be in the very reasonable range.
Here is an example of what the YSlow Plugin displays.
YSlow has 21 categories that it grades your web page performance on from A to F. It also describes what can be done to improve each section.
There is a real science in speeding up your page load times. Start with these tools and you’ll easily see your pages loading in less than 5 seconds.
About the Author
Michael A. Cordova is a website performance specialist to include conversion optimization. Google’s Caffeine algorithm was released in early 2010 will weigh heavily on fast page load times and real-time relevant content. Ignore this at your company’s peril! If you’d like to have assistance in speeding up your page loads or providing real-time informational capabilities for your website then contact us today and Michael will be in touch with you personally within 24 hours.
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