How to Decrease Web Page Loading Time

By now everyone in SEO industry is aware that web page loading is a part of seo/organic search and if you do not work on your page loading time all your effort on SEO may just go down the barrel. From the Official Google Blog

Speeding up websites is important - not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed - that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.​

You should not worry too much because site speed is just small weightage when it comes to page ranking. Still the important factors are like backlinks, relevancy and 200 others. But does it mean that if you are not affected by site speed does it mean you should now work on your page's speed. I don't think so. You should work on web page speed to the extent you can so that you not only make better user experience but in the long run, may not be penalized for slow page loading by Big G when site speed factor becomes a bit more major factor for search engine results.

1. Better Web Host

One of the best place to start with better site experiences is your host. If you do not have good and reliable host the other point may actually be of no use.

2. Compress output

Images take the large chunk of the total time to view any page yet HTML is considerable part of the content delivered by any server. HTML is static text content that can be reduced considerably if you compress the output. Modern day Web servers do support compressed output and all modern browsers are not far behind when rendering the compressed output as well. If any browser that does not support compressed output web servers render normal output to them and so it is wise option to enable compressed output for your server as well.

For PHP and Apache just adding couple of lines in your apache configuration file can actually do this for you.

Code:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
	SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
	# file-types indicated will not be compressed
	SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png|rar|zip|pdf)$ no-gzip dont-vary
	<IfModule mod_headers.c>
		Header append Vary User-Agent
	</IfModule>
</IfModule>

If your website is not very image heavy it can speed up to 60% of bandwidth usage.

3. Optimize HTML

Use Google Webmaster to see which page takes more time and to load and see if you can reduce the size of your HTML code on those pages. Excessive use of tables or even unwanted nested tables just adds to the size of the page.

4. Cache Static Content

If you are into web development you would know the issues with caching but it is not all the sad things that caching can do. If your website images are cached on user's browser he may not need to download them again and again saving you not only lot of bandwidth but this also mean that his each subsequent page visits are faster and quicker for the user.

In Apache, you can just add the following lines and this would mean your images, style sheets and JavaScript code are stored on user PC for 30 days before downloading again.

Code:

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
	ExpiresActive On
	ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
	ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
	ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000
	ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000
	ExpiresByType text/css A2592000 
	ExpiresByType text/js A2592000 
</IfModule>

5. Optimizing Images

Images are one of the main reasons why your pages takes more time to load and so there are more than one way to optimize your images. You can have the same image in 2 different sizes. Try to convert your images to the lowest possible size. This would mean that with the same user experience you actually speed up your pages.

6. Use Image Sprites

Combining lot of small images into a single large image and then placing the same image with the CSS background-position property can save lot of web server requests, file IO and even rendering of lot of small files. Many large websites does this like
Google

Or even Addthis
http://s7.addthis.com/static/r07/widget21.png

7. Cookieless domain

Any query to just download a static content is appended with many header data. Large websites uses different domain (i.gstatic.com by Google) for serving static content and the only reason I can think off is they serve static content from an external domain which does not send header and especially cookies for the content, saving lot of unwanted header data transfer.

8. Avoid Flash

When you use too many flash widgets on your web page it slows down the page considerably. So keep away from flash to the extent possible.

9. Remove un-wanted Gadgets

I see many sites and specially blogs have too many gadgets like temperature, date, map and other such frills and if you think they are not used by your users to the extent you want them to be using it, it's better to remove them from your page.

10. Control Ads

Last but not the least is your ads. Apply the 80/20 rule. 80% of ads generate 20% of revenue and 20% of ads generate 80% of the revenue. Find the right balance between lesser ads with maximum possible revenue. See each ad unit on your page and see how they have performed for last 3 months and see if some ads just generated $0.05 for last 3 months and flush them out. Apart from that you can also see how a rich media ad works and if they are not very different from text ads, opt for text ads.

Reference

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rendering.html

 

Yes that is also a good point.

 

Nice suggestions!

Thanks...

 

by using smush it. you can decrease the loading time of an image.

 

hi...

Optimize site loading page & time...!!! meet again.

 

Hi, I have a website that is www.infoway.us/. I found since the day alexa started showing following message :
Average Load Time for Infoway.us

Slow (2.5 Seconds), 72% of sites are faster.

Note: Slow sites may be penalized by search engines.

my traffic rank is decreasing, From 96K and odd it touched 123 and something in a span of a few days.

Could this slow nature of my site is telling upon the over-all progress including Google ranking? Forget to say Google ranking too has started to to take the back sit. Please help me.

 

hi....

Thanks many to share the web page optimizations..meet again.

:sosp:

 

smush it tool from yahoo is also a good tool to decrease the loading time of an image.

 

Hi,

Gpaphic design is one of the main factor concerned in web page loading. Your first step is reducing your image file size and try to convert it into .png file.

Thanks

 

hi...

first find the reason of you page delayed..then optimize the site..you can get it..!!! meet again.

 

hi...

This can follow the site speed optimizations...??? meet again.

 

Page weight is an important factor and many website owner ignore this thing. Now days, search engine like Google, gives lot of priority to those website how's loading time is less. While developing one should keep C2C factor in mind quite clearly, say maintain more than 18% C2C ration. Try use less JavaScript's, Flash File, Sound File, Images...
Maintain content quality.... it helps a lot to get high SERP...!:nice:

 

these are great info, I will definitely implement some of these steps into my site. thanks

 

Hey,

I am using WP plugin "W3 Total Cache" for my site. But this still seems to be too slow for me. Can you guys point out how to make it fast and how to identify time consuming areas for my site.

Though the title appears almost immediatly in the browser when I press enter for it's URL but after that the whole home page takes time to appear.


My site for your reference is this, expertsguide.info

 

But in webmaster i see this,

"On average, pages in your site take 4.5 seconds to load (updated on Aug 31, 2010). This is slower than 70% of sites."

And there's chart which shows fastness is showing dowload time to be <1.5 seconds to be fast