Page speed one of the hot topic these day in the SEO world. Matt Cutts has confirmed that page speed is also taken in to consideration for ranking a website. Off course its not very big ranking factor but yes it may affect.
In my understanding, including “Page Speed” as a Search Engine Ranking factor Google want to give its user a fast browsing experience. Google’s search share is more than 70% of the total global search. So it means Google has the potential to make the internet fast by taking user to fast websites only.
The websites those are fast may do well in Google SERPs and those are not, will try to be fast. This will lead to a better user experience. To achieve this milestone the initiatives taken by Google and Yahoo! are really appreciable. Google’s “Page Speed Tool” and Yahoo’s “Yslow!” give large information that will let you to make your website faster.
I followed this information and I could speed up my website’s speed by 40%. Three most common thing that every website should follow to reduce the website loading time are-
- Remove Unnecessary Code: Make the size of every file (html, css, js etc) as small as possible. And how can you do it? Simple, just remove the unnecessary code, blank spaces and comments from your page source code.
- Optimizing Code and Files: Put all the inline CSS and inline JavaScript in the external file. Remove unused CSS. Now combine and minify all the CSS, JavaScript and html files. This will greatly reduce the size of each file. Include CSS in the header and JavaScript in footer, will look like your page loading faster as all the content get loaded first then the JavaScript at last.
- Sprite the Images: Spriting the image can save number of HTTP request. Take all your small image and icons in one image only and call the sections of the image required in the desired location by defining classes and IDs through CSS.
If you follow these three steps only you will see great improvement in your website’s loading time.
