Day 8 – How To Speed Up Your Website Load Time

If you have recently read other blogs, forum, etc,  you’ve probably noticed that many readers seem to be worried by their web pages load time. In a nutshell, the common question is: Response time of website is very important? If yes, how can you make your website faster?

Matt Cutts already have said that speed site or blog will soon have more relevance on how your web page rank on Google search results.

Is a fact that user irritation increase if page load time exceed 8 to 10 seconds. According to researches, has been proven that people are reluctant to wait more than 4 seconds for a web page to load.

Most of internet connection are slow because do not have an ADSL line, so people have to spend more time to load any webpage. So, a website that loads faster can be a great way to reach those users that have a slow Internet connection.

Imagine the situation, one of your potential customers or reader come to your site through Google, but he felt frustrated by the slow load web page. So, most probably they will leave your site.

Web hosting provider is one of the major cause of getting a slow website. So, i this article I will show you how to actually measure and test the performance of your web hosting provider and webpages.

How To Measure The Performance Of Your Web Hosting Provider

Image Credit: Condition NYC

First at all, you need to choose a hosting service from a specific country or a region If you are targeting. For instance, when I started the3dtechnologies.com my target area  was U.S. So I choose a webhosting service that could host my site in that country. All my site are hosted in texas.

If your target audience is in the China and your server in USA, then you can’t expect that your audience will see your pages loading as fast as they would if the server was closer to them.

Now, you should also check the page speed from your target area. If you are not in that area, you can ask someone to do it for you. To test the speed of the connection follow these simple step:

• If you use Windows go to:Start  - > Click Run – > Type “cmd” and press enter – > Type “ping [hosting service URL]” and press Enter
• If you use Linux OS:Open a Terminal window and type “ping [hosting service URL]“
• If you use Mac go to:Applications -> Utilities -> Network Utility -> “ping (enter the URL of the hosting service)“

As you can see on the image below, the response I got say “0 % loss“. If you get that response it means that you don’t have to read the results any further.

It means that HTTP packets (data) is getting lost on the way. If the loss is 0% then look for the line that says:

Minimum = [number] ms, Maximum = [number] ms, Average = [number] ms

These numbers should be as low as possible. They tell you how fast the server is responding.

If the hosting server has bad connection, it means that too websites are slowing the server down with heavy content, and then the server will take long time to respond.

• If the numbers are around (or even under) 80 that is good(as my server)
• If they are all over 100 that is not good and you need to look for another hosting service.

3 Great Ways To Measure Your Page Speed

To see the site performance data based on feedback from Google crowler, all you have to do is to log into Google webmaster tools, then select your site, click on labs, then site performance.

Below, I’ve put an screenshot of the3dtechnologies.com performance. In the same page you can also see the 10 pages with the load times for each.

Now, to check how your site is performing, Google’s page speed tool let’s you to track every page of your website that you browse into your desktop.

Installation is easy as pie. All you have to do is to have latest Firefox version as browser and Firebug add-on for Firefox installed.

One done, type the URL you want to check. Go on the menu, select strument, then Firebug, and click on “Open firebug” button.

At this point it will opens one windows on the footer of your browser, where you will notice a new button called “page speed”. Ok, click on this button, then click on “analize system”. That it!

YSlow is a Firefox add-on that show the same information. It provides a grade for each element examined. It returns a green check, yellow triangle or red warning.

To install Yslow you need to have latest Firefox version as browser, download YSlow and have Firebug add-on for Firefox installed.

Now, open Firefox browser, for this example I’ve type “http://www.the3dtechnologies.com”. Ok, now, to using Yslow, there are two ways:

1. Open the Firebug window and click on the YSlow tab.
2. Click the YSlow button on the status bar.

The first time you bring up your browser with YSlow, the following screen will be displayed in the Firebug portion of the browser window:

Click Run Test to run YSlow. One done you should get a result like this

In this case my performace score is 55. To check details the issues detected for that particular page, you simply click on the text next to the grade for each element, whether it’s the the zipping of content, the number of HTTP requests on a page or the placement of JavaScript.

You can also check which files directly impact load times.(e.g., .css files, Flash files, .js files  and so on).

Latest but not least, I also reccomend AOL Page Test tool that provides a series of graphic showing the load times for every element on the page.

How To Speed Up Your Web Pages

If you’ve checked that your website is too slow, here I’ve put some useful tips to help you to speed up them

1. Use css for faster pages - Css can drammatically improve your web site load time. By putting your stiles into a css file, make sure that the browser can cache all the information and stylizing for your pages instead of having to read each and every single tag all over again.

2. Use External Script – When you add javascript code, no add all the code but load javascript files from one source in order to use the same script on multiple page like this:

< script type="text/javascript" src="yourscript.js"></script>

3. Cut Anything You Don’t Really Need – Ok, that could seems obvious, for many of us, but I’ve noticed that many people add tons of images, flash files, java applets, and even sound files. These are the first things to remove when you start your website or blog.

4. Reduce Their File Size – To speedy up your image I reccomend to use JPEG Wizard, a free to use service, which allows you to obtain 20% – 70% more compression with good visual quality than JPEG images created with most image editing packages, including Photoshop.

5. Use clean Themes for your blog – As you can notice on my blog I’ve installed Frugal, which is a WordPress theme without background, tons images, that allows me to load any page fast. Higly reccomended.