Be Careful With the Speed of Your Website!

A slow site means unhappy readers! If your readers gets fed up with the slow loading of your web site, they might not dare to return to it! Not only that, do you know that Google started to rank web sites in their search results, according to the speed of the site? Well.. I think now its time we give more attention to the speed of our web
sites!

What will happen if our site is slow?

First thing that could happens is, you’ll loose some visitors! If a user come to your site, and if he have to wait a couple of minutes to see your site load, I don’t think he will like it. Sometimes, that person will leave the site immediately, or will not return to the site again! All the Internet users don’t have a good Internet connection. Therefore we need to make sure that our site is accessible by all sorts of connections.

Next you’ll loose some SEO specially in Google. Recently, Google started to add site speed as a factor to rank web sites. They say that it won’t do a big change, but they want us to make sure that our site is fast enough to get better rankings.
Using site speed in web search ranking

Sometimes, a heavy slow site may also cause some server problems. If your site is really heavy, your server might need more memory and processing power to load it. Therefore this may cause the server to crash and most of your visitors will face an ugly “500 Internal Server Error” message!

How to measure the site speed?

To do this, we can use several add-ons or web sites :

• Google Page Speed
• Yahoo! YSlow
• Pingdom Tools
• Google Web Master Tools

How to fix the site speed?

• Do not use too many plugins or widgets. Remove all the unnecessary and heavy plugins
• Try to remove unused code and CSS rules
• Try to minify your JavaScript and CSS
• Try to combine your JavaScript and CSS
• Try to reduce the number of HTTP requests that you make to the server
• Optimize the images in your site
• Do not use too many images
• Use server side and client side caching
• Use a CDN like Amazon Cloud Front and MaxCDN

Now I think you get a good idea on how to improve the speed of your web site! If you can’t do these things alone, you can use the help of tools like WEBO Site SpeedUp, Google Page Speed and Yahoo! Yslow . If you use a WordPress blog, you might need to look at WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache. W3 Total Cache is a great tool which have a great amount of features like, Page Cache, Database Cache, Minify and also it helps us to use a CDN for our site.

What do you think? Don’t you think we should see about the speed of our sites now? If you know any more tips and tricks that we have missed out, please feel free to comment about them!