Worst Websites
Google Now Using Site Speed in Web Search Ranking Part 2 — Improving your site
April 9th, 2010 5:05 pm by Vincent Flanders
As I said in a previous post Google is using your site’s speed in its web search rankings — kind of. It’s only partially implemented and only for English queries — right now. Search Engine Land has an excellent non-Google take on the matter.
OK, you’ve found out your site’s loading speed sucks, what do you do?
There are lots of things you can do to speed up your web site. I think the three steps you can take that will improve your site’s performance more quickly (and perhaps have the greatest impact on your site’s speed) are:
- Remove as many f*cking third-party widgets as your boss will let you. Steve Souders’ Performance of 3rd Party Content article states:”Ads, widgets, and analytics are a major cause for slow web sites. P3PC is a project focused on analyzing the performance of 3rd party content. The goal is to find the key wins to evangelize to make 3rd party content faster.”The two worst offenders on his 6-item list are: the Digg widget ad Google’s AdSense. Obviously, Google won’t downgrade you for using AdSense.
His list is far from complete (he’s just starting) and I’ve personally found that the Snap widget, Techmeme widget, Twitter Flash widget, and the Amazon widget that display books are all bandwidth hogs.
- Cache your files— Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header. Yahoo! covers the topic. Information on how to do it is difficult to find and implement. Most articles assume you are a professional system administrator with root access.Here are some articles that I’ve found useful for normal people:
Sample Apache cache configuration
Caching Tutorial
Speed up your site with Caching and cache-control - Compress your web page components. As Yslow states:”Compression reduces response times by reducing the size of the HTTP response. Gzip is the most popular and effective compression method currently available and generally reduces the response size by about 70%. Approximately 90% of today’s Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to support gzip.”Here are articles that I’ve found useful for normal people:
Use mod_deflate to Compress Web Content delivered by Apache
Adding GZIP Compression To Your Site Via .htaccess
Redbot is an important tool to help you see details about your site. Here’s what you see when you visit my articles page and here’s what you see when you click check your assets (really important).
I also find Zoompf’s blog very useful and, of course, Steve Souders’ High Performance Web Sites.
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