We all know that site speed has a correlation with your search rankings, and more importantly we know that it definitely has a direct effect on user satisfaction. With that in mind, there is no excuse for not doing the work needed to make your site more responsive.
The first thing you need to do before tweaking things to increase your site speed is to first find the loading time of your pages. You can do this easily using Google Analytics and checking the average page load time. Of course you’ll need to insert Google Analytic’s snippet for tracking page load time in order to get the required data. Finding out which of your pages are lagging in terms of page load times will help you use your time more wisely since you know which ones have issues that need addressing at once.
Once you find out which pages have problematic loading times, you can use Google’s Page Speed Tools to find out exactly what you can do to optimize your page. You can either use the Page Speed tool as a browser extension, or use the Page Speed Online tool, which is a web-based tool. You will be given a Page Speed Score (perfect score of 100), which indicates not the loading time of the page, but how much room for improvement there is in terms of following best practices related to page speed. The good thing about these tools is that they will point out which of the best practices the page you’re having analysed have yet to follow so as to reduce page load time. Suggestions for improvement are categorized according to priority so that you will know which issue to tackle first. Clicking on each suggestion will give you a brief explanation of how following that suggestion will improve your site speed, and will also give a detailed list of all pages affected by the oversight. Best practices pointed out range from serving scaled images to preferring asynchronous resources.
Once you do know what needs to be done in order to improve your site’s speed, all you need to do is just carry out the suggestions where possible. If you are just getting started with search engine optimization and do not understand most of the suggestions, don’t get daunted by the jargon. A little research will help you a lot since a lot of the suggestions are actually quite easy to implement. However, for suggestions that are really quite too technical for you, then just go ahead and enlist the help of a developer.
Another way you can make life a bit easier for you is to sign up for Google’s Page Speed Service. Unfortunately, signing up won’t guarantee that you will indeed be able to enjoy the service since it is still in a period of limited availability, but if you do get approved for this service you can rest knowing that Google’s doing all the hard work for you to ensure fast loading times.
Good luck!
Vic Carrara
MasterWebSoftware.com
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