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Your website’s speed, or how fast it loads for the average user, has becoming one of those newly discovered factors that plays a role in how well your website ranks.
There have been several studies that show websites suddenly going up in the rankings solely because it suddenly loaded faster for people. Google is all about user experience, so it wants to provide users with the best experiences when searching for any terms.
Nowadays, it’s vital that businesses looking to get online exposure consider this factor when developing and updating their websites. Here are a few simple tips you can follow to make your website blazing fast and very search engine friendly.
1) Upgrade your hosting
While the average hosting package, such as GoDaddy, Netfirms, and HostGator, may work perfectly well for the average website, sometimes it may pay off to go with higher quality hosting providers such as Rochen Hosting or A Small Orange. These hosting providers are generally smaller and more customer service centered, while also providing much faster data servers that have less user load on them. As a result, you get your website files being loaded and provided faster to a visitor, therefore improving your site speed.
2) Optimize images
An often overlooked aspect of site speed is the optimization of images. Images usually are the reason a website loads slowly. Over the last decade, people have continuously worked on image compression and optimization in order to get the best quality imagery out of the least data possible. You should really take advantage of this! For example, most photos should be saved as JPEGS, while graphics should be saved as PNGs. Make sure they’re compressed properly and sized appropriate. By taking a few minutes to make sure everything is set correctly, you could shave crucial seconds off load time.
3) Take advantage of Gzip Compression
If you really want to take it an extra step, you may need to get into a bit more technical changes. Besides optimizing and minimizing Javascript and CSS sprites, you can also enable a special algorithm that will compress and your information right before sending it to the user. This allows the user to load the information much faster. Rather than spending vital seconds waiting for the server and user to switch information back and forth, Gzip sends all the website information to the user in a compressed format. You can learn more about how it works here.
A good place to start seeing how your website stacks up to others in terms of site speed is by downloading the Page Speed plugin for FireFox. This plugin, recommended by Google, will analyze your website server speed and even give you technical recommendation on how to optimize your site. Give it a go today and get started speeding your site up!
