Five Tips For Speeding Up Your Website

Last week Google officially talked about what had been know for a while, they are using site speed as one factor to determine search results rankings. Google says that this affected fewer than 1% of search results. Should you care about the speed it takes your page to load?

Yes, you should care. Not because you might be in that 1% of searches affected, but because faster load times improve the experience of your website visitors.

What To Do

Here are some basic things you can do to improve your websites download speed.

Test Your Website
Testing your website speed is a good first step. Google lists several test, but I like www.webpagetest.org/test, unlike many of the other tests, it does not require you to download the Firefox Firebug plug-in. With webpagetest, you can test you page at DSL speeds (1500 Kb/s) or fast cable connection speeds (20Mb/s).

Don't Freak Out
You will probably get several message about how bad your site is.

• It probably doesn't compress text files
• Cookies are being sent with graphics 
• There are no Entity Tags (ETags). 

Most shared hosting environments suffer from all of these and there is likely nothing you can do about those issues. But you can look for problems you can control that could be causing download speed problems.

Look at elements of the web page that are taking a lot of time to download.

Check Image Size
Websites use images and these images are probably one of most common source of slow download speeds.

If you have a copy of your site on you local drive, go to the image's directory and view them. In Windows, use the "Detail" view and sort by size.

If your website is on a server then connect to the server (using FTP) and view the image directory, sorting by file size.

Do you have several images over 100KB? What about images over 500KB. This can happen if you are taking digital pictures and not resizing them for the web.

JavaScript or CSS On Your Web Pages
View your web page's source (from most Windows computers right click on the page and select "View Source" when looking a web page).

Are there large sections of code between "script"
or "style" tags? Copy that code into a text file (such notepad) save the file to your disk and see how much code can be "saved" from each page.

You can ask your developer if that code can be moved to external files. That information if it is reused on most pages and is in external files, will be cached on the visitors computer and needs to be downloaded only once.

.Net Code
Microsoft .Net is notorious for adding code to pages. View the page source and look for a hidden field with the name and ID of "__VIEWSTATE". Check out how large it is? If your page contains content that doesn't change or has no buttons or fields that interact with web users, then this field should be very small. I've seen sites, where this field was 10KB out of a web page that was 20KB in size.

Your developer can reduce the size of this field by turning off "viewstate" on a page or on .Net controls.

CMS White Space
Some CMS systems will spit out lots of line feeds and blank spaces. Sometimes this can be 15% of the length of the HTML file.

View your page's source and look for lots of blank lines, with tabs or spaces. Ask your developer or vendor if these can be reduced.

Look For General Code Bloat
Some applications offer export to HTML options, but the code they export has lots of unnecessary extras. Sometimes pages can be shrunk by 80% if built properly.

Isn't Everyone On Broadband?

Even though 94% of active US web surfers use broadband, under 30% of US households have broadband.

Also there are several factors that can affect the speed of a broadband connection.

• Package ordered - Some DLS plans start at 768kb/s
• DSL - Distance from ISP equipment
• Cable Modem - Number of users online in your neighborhood.
• Number of computers connected in your house.

That last item can be the most evident. In our house it is typical for one person to be playing an online game, someone else to be watching YouTube videos and a third person to be surfing the internet. If I am the person surfing, my connection seems to crawl at times when the kids play games or watch videos.

You can perform a speed test to see how fast your connection is. If you are like me, then you can get very different results depending on when you perform the test.

Just Do It

Take some time to improve your user's experience, make your site download faster.