Increasing the speed of your website is not only good for your users because it means they can get around your content faster but according to Google it ranks faster sites higher in its search results then slower ones.
Here’s what Google have to say on the subject.
You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.
So here’s some tools you can use to optimize your sites page loading time.
1. Testing your site with WebPageTest.org
WebPageTest.org will analyze your site & report back it’s loading time on first & second viewing. But more importantly it will analyze everything your site loads including images, scripts & so on, so you can see what’s taking the longest to load.
By analyzing this data you will be able to see if there’s a particular item or items loading on your page that’s causing your load times to increase dramatically & then you can take action to fix it.
2. The Google Speed Site
Google wants to help you make your sites faster. It’s good for them & good for you so they’re happy to help! So they created Google Speed where you’ll find lot’s of useful tools & information on reducing your sites load time.
So there you have two useful tools in the fight against high load times!
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I did the following to speed up my blog loading time.
1. I cleared out any plugins I did not need (went from 40+ to about 20).
2. Installed the W3Cache plugin.
3. optimised my database,
It runs twice as fast now.
Thanks for the tips Dean.
I like this post…I’m always looking to decrease the load times of my site. The first time is the SLOOOOOWEST coming in at about 5.6 seconds I think, the 2nd visit is only 3.08 ..So, I’m trying to get my first time load faster.
I didn’t know that the search engines care so much about the loading time of my site but after I found out I tried to clear all the pages of the unnecesary pictures, and I even resized some of the photos so that they are smaller in size and they load faster.
Thanks for the info.
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