Three Easy Ways To Speed Up Your Site

With all the recent talk by the search engines about site speed, now may be the right time to evaluate your site. I’m not sure how strong a ranking factor it will ever become, I really doubt Google is going to get the stopwatch out and do the SERPs like a 100m race. Nonetheless, I do see why streamlining our pages would be encouraged – it would provide a slightly improved experience for visitors, while getting rid of a few bytes here and there that no longer need to be indexed.

So what can a web admin actually do? Well, surely the first step is monitoring the thing. Check out the Google Webmaster Tools (click Labs => Site Performance) or a commercial tool like mon.itor.us (whose free trial I’m on and can recommend) to see how you’re doing. Next, see the three ideas below to get you going. There are more techniques to consider, but three is a good number to start with.

1. Define Image Dimensions

This is an important factor that’s easy to overlook. When using images and tables, do populate the height and width tags as they tell the browser how to construct the page even before downloading all of its elements. Simple and effective, yet quite a few big websites don’t do this.

2. Use A Minification Tool

There are tools that can remove all unnecessary characters in your JavaScript and CSS file, while keeping functionality the same. They’re free too, here’s a video from Yahoo about their YUI Compressor.

3. Install the Page Speed Firefox Add-on

Google themselves provide an excellent Page Speed add-on for the also excellent Firebug add-on in Firefox. That’s a brilliant and informative tool that can only get better as it comes out of Beta. You can download it from Google Code.