Like it or not the Google Caffeine update is upon us – some speculate that Google’s new algorithm is already live on some servers. The Caffeine update is changing the way Google delivers its results, so if you haven’t already, you need to make sure your site is Caffeine-ready! Our “5 Top Tips for Optimising Your Site for Google Caffeine” already summarises how engaging more in Social Media will help you perform better in Caffeine. (See our SEO Training in Brighton, Sussex, to learn more about search).

Because of the increased use of mobiles for web-browsing, Google is also trying to make the web faster – and one of the factors affecting how well you’re going to rank is how fast your site loads.

So – if you’ve got a slow old pig of a website it’s time to pull your finger out and do something about it!

How to make your pages load faster

Don’t know where to start? Here’s our 5 top tips to speed up your site for Caffeine:

1. Analyse your current speed

Before you do anything you need to see how fast (or slow) your site is loading now. You might find you’re already fine! In any case, you’ll want to set a benchmark so that you can see the effect of the improvements you’re about to make.

Use http://tools.pingdom.com/ to find out how fast your site loads. This is one of the more useful site speed tools as it saves your previous results, so you can track your performance over time.

Google haven’t put a number on how fast your page will need to load to rank well (it’s algorithm will be a lot more complex than just a number of seconds!) – however, putting Google to one side for a minute – from a “real people” usability point of view, longer than 5-8 seconds load time and users are going to give up – so if you’re coming in over 5 you’re already in big trouble!

Another useful speed test can be found at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ which provides quite a detailed breakdown of each element of your site, and what can be improved…

So – how do we fix things?

2. Optimise your images

One of slowest things to load on any site are the images, and this is the best place to start if you’re looking for an improvement.

If you’ve got lots of images over 50k then its time to think about getting rid of some of them, or reducing the file size.

First – make sure you’re using the right type of image. As a rule of thumb:

jpegs are better for photographic images which contain a lot of detail

gifs are better for line drawings or simple logos with straight lines

Second – make sure you’re optimising the images so that the file size is as small as possible without compromising quality. Photoshop’s “Save for Web” function is great for this, as it allows you to see the effect of your changes to image quality before you save the file, so you always get a happy medium between file size and image quality.

You can learn more about image optimisation on our Web Design Training course and Photoshop Course for Web Graphics. Why not come on the whole Web Design Week

3. Get rid of any superfluous HTML

The size of your page’s HTML file is also an important consideration – the more HTML you have, the longer it will take the page to load. If you’ve used a WYSIWYG tool like Dreamweaver, you can often end up with more code than you need.

The thing that can make the biggest difference is tables – a big no-no now for accessibility anyway, but found all too often in older sites. If you’re using tables anywhere on your page, you should definitely think about converting your layout to CSS – this can reduce your HTML size by up to 50%!

There’s a whole bunch of other things you can do to reduce your HTML – check out Webmaster World’s Forum post on the subject

We cover how to review the HTML code that Dreamweaver automatically produces in our Dreamweaver Course

4. Reduce the size of your CSS stylesheets

OK – so you’ve used CSS to reduce the size of your HTML file – great – you’re a web 2.0 superstar!

BUT – don’t get too big-headed – you can also make your CSS stylesheets smaller by optimising them.

Some ways you can do this are:

• Use shortcuts
• Group selectors with the same properties /values together
• Put inline or internal styled in an external CSS file so they don’t have to load every time on each page

These, and some other great suggestions are covered in this blog post

All Greek to you? Our CSS Training and Advanced CSS Training courses will make things clearer

Or – ask your web designer to sort it out for you!

5. Reduce your JavaScript

Perhaps another one for the techies out there, but having too much JavaScript can slow your website down considerably

A lot of sites use JavaScript to do things it’s not needed for like rollovers, which can now be done by all browsers using CSS – here’s a guide on how to do it

That’s our top 5!

This guide covers the main “quick wins” in terms of improving your website’s speed – by it’s by no means exhaustive and there’s a range of other things you can do to speed up your site.

However, if you’ve been through this list and made adjustments at each stage you should be able to go back to the site load test tool we looked at in part one and see a marked improvement in your load time, and Google Caffeine’s gonna love you!

Similar posts you may like

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2. Google Analytics Email Tracking: 5 Step Guide
3. Optimising Your Website for Google Caffeine – 5 top tips
4. Comparing present Google results with Google Caffeine
5. Google inject search engine with Caffeine

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