Loading ...Late last year, Google’s Matt Cutts told WebProNews that site performance would be a critical factor this year. Since that time, site performance has been a hot topic in the SEO community. Incidentally, Maile Ohye, also from Google, calls this area an “uncharted SEO territory” in a recent interview with WPN.
According to her, simple changes to the front end, such as how you order the style sheets and JavaScript files, can have a big impact on speed and, ultimately, conversions. She references a test that Strangeloop conducted in which it compared the site performance of an optimized site to the site performance on a non-optimized site. The test found that the optimized site had a 16 percent increase in conversions over the non-optimized site.
Ohye explains the importance of ordering style sheets and JavaScript files since it could save visitors seconds when visiting your site. She suggests having statements at the top that bring in the style sheets first followed by the JavaScript files.
For images, she advises webmasters to use image sprites, which are essentially single files that can have multiple images listed throughout the file. This eliminates the task of making file requests for each image. With sprites, webmasters can use CSS to choose which images should display where.
Although the topic of “speed as a ranking factor” has also been getting a lot of press lately, Ohye says users will not wake up one day and find the fastest sites with the highest rankings. She goes on to say that this element of ranking is more suited for sites that are so slow the users are dissatisfied.
Ohye also tells webmasters they can check their own site’s performance by applying the site performance feature in the labs section of Google’s webmaster tools. This tool will tell users how their site compares with all the other sites on the Web.
How is your site’s performance?
It’s been no secret that website performance would be a critical factor this year and webmaster tools and the firefox plugin mentioned in this story are very good resource tools for web marketing professionals and clients alike. No one likes a slow site and reducing code bloat and optimising linked files is good house keeping.
If you are using WordPress for your site, you can gain big performance gains by using the WP Super Cache plugin. This plugin essentially caches a static version of your WordPress site so that when a visitor hits your site, they are not slowed down by processing PHP and database calls.
For Real Estate Web Sites this is crucial as we have more dynamic interaction with the site user than typical sites. Great interview as always with WPN!!!!
Best group of condensed tips on improving “performance” (otherwise known as page loading speed) I have heard in a long time. I wish that interview went for another five minutes. Thank-you Maile Ohye and WPN video, very good.
SEO on site is a detailed topic and difficlut to understand tropic. Google is always updating , changing search engine rankings and website owners have to update therie site offen.
Thanks guys! I think the best point Maile made was that load speed is always best for user satisfaction. The fact that it’s a ranking factor is just a bit more incentive for us to get on top of it quickly.
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Having in mind that SEO may disappear very soon replaced by the SMO, it’s good to remember that there are still some areas of the SEO that are necessary and applicable to every website. The good performance has to be one of the top priorities of the SEO specialists, I agree. But I am wondering what priority is giving Google to the speed and is it possible for us to begin finding fast websites before quality content sites in the search results?
Cool.. Thanks to Maile Ohye for her valuable tips to increase site performance. Btw, just a quick note… the site listed in the video google.com/speed is not correct, it should rather be code.google.com/speed/
cheers.
The link she states “google.com/speed” doesn’t seem to work for me.. Can anyone else access this?
@Jamie instead of google.com/speed, try the following url:
http://code.google.com/speed/
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