Preparing for Caffeine Page Rank – 5 Tips for Improving Site Loading Time
ShareThis is a follow up article on Google’s new Caffeine search technique will now be affected by a website or a blog’s loading time (read Blogging Tips – Site Load Time to Affect Google Page Rank Says Matt Cutts). Here I will show 5 easy ways that can help improve your website or blog’s loading time.
You can follow these instructions carefully & you will see significant changes to your website or blog’s time to load.
Load Time definition: In layman’s terms, it is the time that is taken to render a single web page completely on an internet web browser.
The First Step towards improving the website’s loading time is to benchmark your site’s load time before you make any changes. You can use a free internet tool like Pingdom.com & note 2 things:
1. how long your takes to load now
2. which all sections (images, scripts etc) takes long time to load
The Second Step towards improving the website’s loading time is to carry out these following modifications.
- Tip 1 to Improve Page Load Time & Improve Google caffeine Page Rank – Reduce File Sizes
Make your website files smaller in size. Blogs use template files, while static websites could be made up of individual pages (with various extensions like .htm, .html, .asp, .jsp, .php etc).
Edit your files or blog templates to delete any white spaces. Each space, line break, tab that you insert in the template files or the website page adds to it’s size. Deleting any such unused spaces will reduce the file sizes & make your page load faster.
Note that spaces are often kept for formatting & it usually helps to maintain & edit them later on if you have spaces.
Similarly, remove any unwanted comments from your pages & blog templates as well. Comments also increase the file size without affecting the look & feel or the contents.
- Tip 2 to Improve Page Load Time & Improve Google caffeine Page Rank – use CSS stylesheets rather than inline styling
A stylesheet (files with extension .CSS) contains the codes that define how your website or blog would look, including areas of texts, images, links etc. You can also define these look & feel by including styles within templates & individual files. These are called inline styles and override the ones in stylesheets.
But each inline style you use, your website or blog page’s loading time increases. Remove all inline styling & copy them into your stylesheets.
- Tip 3 to Improve Page Load Time & Improve Google caffeine Page Rank – Consolidate Javascript functions into 1 file
Much like stylesheets, Javascripts can be coded inside the individual pages or templates. Or they can reside outside of them in files with extension .js. Instead of using multiple small javascript files, you can copy all your scripts into one single file.
You can edit individual javascript files, copy all the content & paste them into 1 javascript file. You can then refer to this single file in the <head> section of your page or template.
- Tip 4 to Improve Page Load Time & Improve Google caffeine Page Rank – reduce image file sizes & eliminate “include” files
Look into the the report you had from Pingdom.com in First Step. Find out all the images that are taking long time to load. Edit them to a smaller file size.
Check your files & blog templates for places where you are using the “include” function. In Wordpress templates, you will find codes like <?php include(“filename”) ?>. Its best if you can avoid including external files & bring them into the main page or template directly.
- Tip 5 to Improve Page Load Time & Improve Google Caffeine Page Rank – enable caching on your server
Speak to your website hosting service provider & ask for steps to allow “server caching”. If you are using Wordpress, you can use any of the popular caching plugins. The ones that are very reputed are WP-Cache & WP-Super Cache.
Caching plugins help you to serve cached pages to the visitors automatically. Cached pages load faster than normal template based Wordpress pages or posts.
A Note on Using Advertisements & Analytic tools
Advertisements & analytic tools built into the pages often slow down the websites. It is a good idea to place ads strategically so that they do not slow down your website to a large extent. As for the analytic tools (like Google Analytics, Site Counter codes etc), it is best to place them in the footer of your website or blog templates.
The Third Step towards improving the website’s loading time is to measure the loading time again, after you have implemented all the 5 recommended steps. Use pingdom.com & measure the improvements against the benchmark you had before you made any changes.
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