The internet’s main search engine recently announced a small but important change to its ranking algorithm. They are now taking a web site’s speed into account when calculating its ranking in the search results. This means that if there are two web sites that are equal in all other respects, the one that downloads most quickly will appear higher in the search results.

As a webmaster, what does this mean for you? It means that you have to optimize your site and remove any unnecessary images or text. Is there any content that you put on to a separate page and provide a link to that page. Remove any pictures that aren’t essential It is often better to provide information in plain text, rather than by using a graphic.

There are also some other methods that you can use to make your web site download more quickly. If you will be keeping images on your site, such as your logo, consider reducing their quality. Programs such as Photoshop allow you to select the quality of JPEG images; consider making the image a lower quality image, which will reduce the size of the image. Alternatively, try changing your image from a JPEG to a GIF (or vice versa). The JPEG and GIF formats were designed for particular types for images, and you may find that one will be smaller than the other.

Consider removing any Javascript or other scripts from your site, particularly any scripts that could be replaced with a server-side script. If you have Javascript that validates information in a form, consider doing the validation after the form has been submitted.

A content delivery network (CDN) will help speed up the delivery of your site. A CDN has several servers located at various points around the world. When a user requests a web page or image from your site, they will be directed to the closet server. As a result, the amount of time taken to transfer it to the user’s computer will be small.

If you will be keeping some, or all, of your website on one server, ensure that the server compresses the information before sending it to the user. Most modern browsers are capable of receiving compressed files and displaying them as normal. Compression works particularly well on HTML and CSS files, where a small number of tags are used repetitively. If you run Apache on your own server, consider using the mod_deflate module to compress your files. If you are looking for a web hosting provider, select one that has the mod_deflate module installed; you may need to contact the web host’s helpdesk to see if they have this module.

You can stop a user’s browser from downloading components unnecessarily by adding an Expires: header to your files. If your site has any static files that are unlikely to change in the near future, an Expires: header will tell the browser how long it can keep the file for. The browser will then store the file in its cache, and will not download the file again until the date specified in the Expires: header. This feature is easily handled if you have Apache installed on your own server, and you have the mod_expires module installed.

If you follow several of these steps, you will reduce the amount of time it takes to download your site. This will hopefully have a positive effect on your rankings in the search engines.


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