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At the end of last year I wrote a post about upcoming changes in the world of search in 2010, which you can read here. one of the things I mentioned in the post was the importance of how fast your website loads.
Google has rolled out ‘caffeine’, which is a change in the way it indexes websites. In order to index the web more efficiently, it is crawling website much faster and to satisfy this, your site needs to load in super fast time. You can find out how fast your site loads using Google’s page speed test and you can also find it in webmaster tools which I wrote about last week (link to post) You need to aim for your site to load in about 2 seconds.
If your site is on the slow side, there are a few things you can do to speed it up, which will probably require input from your web developer:
1. Ensure all your images are optimized for the web to load as fast as possible. The same with any pdf, video and other downloads you have on your site.
2. Make sure that the code of your web pages isn’t too ‘bloated’ as this can cause the search engines to slow down while they wade through it.
You can read a useful article about this here
3. Minimise use of flash as this takes time to download and search engines, let alone visitors to your website, won’t hang around for long waiting for it to download.
4. Use a reputable web hosting company and ensure you have adequate bandwidth. If traffic is increasing to your website significantly and as your site grows, it uses more bandwidth. if your bandwidth is inadequate, your site will load very slowly, which is really annoying for visitors to your site! You can read more about what website bandwidth means here.
How quickly does your website download? Is it fast enough to satisfy visitors with ever decreasing patience levels as well as the search engines?
