Yes, speed matters.
Search engines use a multitude of factors to determine how to rank search engine results, and one of those factors is website speed. The speed at which someone can view the content on your site factors into your search engine rankings.
In addition, having a slow website affects the user experience and could result in viewer abandonment. Web users are impatient, plain and simple. No one wants to experience the age of dial up again, so don’t force them.
Juice up your website load speeds with these tips.
Where is it hosted?
Are you on a private dedicated server or shared server? Sites like GoDaddy and Network Solutions offer cheap hosting but it is usually on a shared server, meaning you share it with thousands of others all trying to grab a piece of the bandwidth pie. Emails, website queries, and regular data transfers can impact bandwidth usage resulting in slower speeds and even the occassional drop.
Are Your Photos Optimized?
Use an image optimizing plugin or better yet downsize your photos to the specs you need before you load them to your website. Though the manual process of resizing photos beforehand takes more time to do, the results are better than relying on an automated program.
Site Compression with HT Access
By compressing your HTML and CSS files, you can save 50-70% of the file size, which decreases load time on your pages and uses less bandwidth.
Note, installing a cache plugin on your site will allow your site to cache certain elements. This will decrease your page load speed, however we find even the most reputable cache plugins can cause problems.
Set File Expirations
Using the good ole HT Access file, you can set expiration times for various file extensions like: 1 week for JPG, 2 Days for CSS, and 1 minute for HTML.
Disable Hotlinking and Content Leeching
People like to reuse images on websites. Instead of downloading the image and loading the image to their own website, they simply copy the file URL so that any time that image is viewed, it pulls from your website effecting your bandwidth and load speeds.
Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should
Are all the bell and whistles really nessecary? Are they even being used? Remove unused plugins, scripts, or other code that is polluting your website. Extra (sloppy) code hurts.
Parting note, the FireBug Addon with Google Pagespeed for FireFox really comes in handy identifying areas to work on.
Need assistance with your website speed? Idea Marketing Group specializes in all things website marketing, and we can help!