Page Load Speed Matters to Google
How long does it take for your web pages to load? Don't know or care? Well you should, if you want to place higher in search results. Speed matters to Google. Besides, slow loading web sites are annoying to most people.Google's aim is to make the internet experience as enjoyable as possible. Two firms beliefs that they have shown are that: (1) websites should look good regardless of if they're being viewed on a mobile device or a desktop; and (2) websites should load quickly. They frequently test websites on these things and will penalize websites that don't comply by lowering them in search results.
Cache In
When someone tries to visit a webpage, and web browser asks the server to return the contents, it takes time. The server needs to process the request, as well as send the data back to the person. To speed this up, you can use caching. Caching stores parts of the web page, if not the entire page, so the server doesn't need to be contacted each time a person loads it. Not only does it save the time that the server would ordinarily have to process the request, but it also reduces the amount of time that it takes to receive the data. The information is typically loaded from a search engine's servers, web browsers (which is why you occasionally may need to delete your local history to speed up your PC), or content delivery networks.Content delivery networks (CDNs) are a way for you to enable caching of your site. They essentially take snapshots of your site and store a copy on their servers that are geographically dispersed. Since copies of your site are stored, a web users receives this copy which eliminates, or lessens, the processing from your server. Also, since they use many servers, which are spread out, they can send these copies of your site from the closest location to the web browser which also decreases the page load speed. With CDN's, you can choose what's cached - you may not want to store full pages - as well as how long is something is cached. For example, you may want a web page (or its elements) to be cached hourly, daily or weekly (depending on how frequently it changes). At a minimum, it's a generally a good practice to cache things like images because they can be big and they rarely change (once you upload photo.jpg, the file photo.jpg rarely changes).Here are some CDN service providers:
Mini(fy) Me
Websites use CSS (.css) and JavaScript (.js) files to tell browsers how to display them. While these files are generally small, they can add up if you have more than one to load. Minifying them combines them and makes them even more compact by eliminating spaces that are only in the file to make the text easier for humans to read. So instead of having to load 5-10 JavaScript and CSS files, you can load one of each. Less files to load means faster page load speed. This becomes even faster if you minify your files and do caching for your site.You can manually consolidate and minify your CSS and JavaScript files using free tools on the internet:For JavaScript: http://minifyjavascript.com/For CSS: http://cssminifier.com/To see if your website could benefit from caching and minification, you can use Google's free tool, PageSpeed Insights.[contentblock id=1]
