HostStage
Elite Member
- May 20, 2010
- 2,083
- 1,836
Hey Guys,
Today, i'm going to cover a critical aspect of on page SEO. Hang On it will be long and not necessary exhaustive.
Page Speed is very important for 2 reasons :
- It helps Google to crawl further your website which is good for indexing of course
- It reduces your bounce rate or worse your pogosticking as your website is loading very slowly.
NB : Pogosticking = when a user goes to your website, goes back, picks another website and stay at your competitor. G. Panda take it as a factor of quality and you can now get outranked because of it.
Here are the tips :
1) The first thing to do is to used a golden tool which is the google page speed plugin :
For firefox users you have to use a plugin named firebug which is just great !
Once you have set it up properly, run a page speed test on your website. And try to match the orange, and red spot titles with this how to.
2) Enable Gzip if your web hosting provider allows it. Add this line at the top of your websites :
Then you can check if it is enabled here :
3) Compress your images. This is easy a bit boring but it increases drastically your loading time.
For that you can use either photoshop, The Gimp (free) or what i use personnally as i find it convenient the Google Page Speed plugin itself.
As it is showing you which images are optimized and which are not and allow to compress them with the save as button.
4) Open / Create a .htaccess file and place this code :
This will litteraly do some magic. If you have problem with the Gzip code stated above you can paste the full content. If you don't have problem with it you can remove this :
5) Place your javascript ressources at the bottom of your page. Personnally i don't do it, as i like to have my header with everything in it. But it will definitly help
6) Another thing i don't do because i go quite often in the code of my website, but you can remove the blank space of every file of your website, it will reduce the size of your pages by 10-25% according the lenght. You could do it for CSS code too.
7) Optimize your SQL databases the more often you can according to your traffic, through PHPmyadmin or through your CMS. This will bring you a light improvement and prevent you for unexpected crash.
Wordpress Users :
1) If you use wordpress you have to use a caching plugin like supercache or hypercache, it will drastically help with your loading time. You can earn something like 800% of your loading time with such a plugin according to some benchmarks :
Here is the place to find Super Cache :
To Go Further :
To be honest i don't do these as it is time killing when you have a website already and it makes you earn between 2 and 5 points in G speed :
1) Use CSS Sprites : The concept is to merge all your website's structural images into 1 mockup, then use the CSS to place the others elements into your mockup.
2) Use External Subdomain to load your external ressources (Javascript for exemple). It will allow you to use the speed of 2 servers instead of 1 to load your content
I believe there are others criterias i may have omitted but this is a good basis to drastically increase your loading time. It is an open thread, so go ahead with your own methods.
Today, i'm going to cover a critical aspect of on page SEO. Hang On it will be long and not necessary exhaustive.
Page Speed is very important for 2 reasons :
- It helps Google to crawl further your website which is good for indexing of course
- It reduces your bounce rate or worse your pogosticking as your website is loading very slowly.
NB : Pogosticking = when a user goes to your website, goes back, picks another website and stay at your competitor. G. Panda take it as a factor of quality and you can now get outranked because of it.
Here are the tips :
1) The first thing to do is to used a golden tool which is the google page speed plugin :
For firefox users you have to use a plugin named firebug which is just great !
Once you have set it up properly, run a page speed test on your website. And try to match the orange, and red spot titles with this how to.
2) Enable Gzip if your web hosting provider allows it. Add this line at the top of your websites :
PHP:
<?php if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')) ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); else ob_start(); ?>Then you can check if it is enabled here :
3) Compress your images. This is easy a bit boring but it increases drastically your loading time.
For that you can use either photoshop, The Gimp (free) or what i use personnally as i find it convenient the Google Page Speed plugin itself.
As it is showing you which images are optimized and which are not and allow to compress them with the save as button.
4) Open / Create a .htaccess file and place this code :
This will litteraly do some magic. If you have problem with the Gzip code stated above you can paste the full content. If you don't have problem with it you can remove this :
5) Place your javascript ressources at the bottom of your page. Personnally i don't do it, as i like to have my header with everything in it. But it will definitly help
6) Another thing i don't do because i go quite often in the code of my website, but you can remove the blank space of every file of your website, it will reduce the size of your pages by 10-25% according the lenght. You could do it for CSS code too.
7) Optimize your SQL databases the more often you can according to your traffic, through PHPmyadmin or through your CMS. This will bring you a light improvement and prevent you for unexpected crash.
Wordpress Users :
1) If you use wordpress you have to use a caching plugin like supercache or hypercache, it will drastically help with your loading time. You can earn something like 800% of your loading time with such a plugin according to some benchmarks :
Here is the place to find Super Cache :
To Go Further :
To be honest i don't do these as it is time killing when you have a website already and it makes you earn between 2 and 5 points in G speed :
1) Use CSS Sprites : The concept is to merge all your website's structural images into 1 mockup, then use the CSS to place the others elements into your mockup.
2) Use External Subdomain to load your external ressources (Javascript for exemple). It will allow you to use the speed of 2 servers instead of 1 to load your content
I believe there are others criterias i may have omitted but this is a good basis to drastically increase your loading time. It is an open thread, so go ahead with your own methods.
