actinic
online marketing blog
Monday, May 12, 2008
Why You Should Optimize Your Page Load Time
On the 8th May, Google announced that they are now using landing page load time as a factor in assessing the quality score for Google Adwords ads.
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/05/landing-page-load-time-now-available-on.html
This means that it you advertise on Google Adwords, it may cost you more to maintain the same ranking on Google if your pages take a long time to load.
It also suggests that the same may well be true for Google's organic listing. So even if you don't advertise, now would be a good time to check your page load times and try to make improvements.
Firstly, you can use a tool like the 1&1 Site Checker, http://sitechecker.1and1.co.uk/analyze/?ladezeit, to find out how long your pages take to load and compare them with your competitors.
If your performance is poor, you will need to find out why. There are several factors that may be involved.
1) Latency
If your web site is on a server in a different country, the pages will take longer to load because of the distance and, more importantly, the number of different steps in the connection between your customers and your web site. Consider relocating your site to a server that is in the same country as most of your customers - even if it costs a little more.
2) Server performance
Cut-price web hosting that crams a large number of sites onto a single server is a false economy. Performance will inevitably be affected, especially at peak times. Upgrading to a proper ecommerce web hosting package will greatly improve the browsing experience, and almost certainly increase sales.
3) Images
Large images greatly increase the amount of data that has to be delivered before a page is fully loaded. Use smaller images that open larger versions when you click on them. Make sure that jpegs are compressed as much as possible, consistent with the image quality you need to achieve. In general, 5% compression will not produce noticeable loss of quality, and will significantly reduce the file size. Anything over 20% is likely to be highly noticeable, and won't deliver much saving in size.
Wherever possible, use CSS styles instead of images for the site design. A lot can be done with CSS to add background colours, borders and other effects, without the need to use images.
4) Code
If all else fails, go through the code and eliminate unnecessary content such as Comment tags. For Actinic-based ecommerce pages, make sure Actinic is set to Compact the code before uploading.
In general, a tableless CSS-based design will be noticeably more compact and faster to load than an equivalent design using more traditional methods. Some effects that in the past required Javascript, such as pop-up menus, can now be achieved far more efficiently using style sheets.
# posted by Actinic @ 9:11 AM 
