What Is Page Speed And How Will It Help You?
The time taken to load a page is known as page speed. It has recently become the focus of Google. To understand why, we need to think about Google's ultimate customers. It has two sets of customers that it needs to please. The first are the users of its search engine. The second are its advertisers.
It is no secret that a slow loading page is detrimental to the
user's
experience. Don't we all get frustrated when it takes more than a nano
second for page to load? Absolutely. Well Google now has
this issue in its cross hairs.
User satisfaction has always been its focus and is a key to its survival. As an attempt to address this factor, Google Page Speed was born.
What exactly is Google Page Speed?
It is a Firefox/Firebug Add-on that both evaluates and provides recommendations for the improvement of web page performance.
Google's search engine algorithms use over 200 unique factors when
evaluating
the important of a particular web page or site. It is these
factors that are
used to determine web pages rankings. Now, Google has added page speed
to the list of factors that will help them with the ranking of a web
page.
In general, people tend to stick to a page that loads fast and leave
pages that take a long time to load. The faster a page loads the better
the user's experience. Google for its part wishes to provide its
users with the best
experience and as a result, begun to reward pages that load faster.
Currently, Google is using page speed as a ranking factor in just
one percent of its search queries. However, given the fact that
each day over a billion
searches are executed, it wont be long until page speed fully kicks
in. Once it does, pages that load faster will have an edge and
potentially rank higher than a competitor, all other things equal.
By using the Google Page Speed tool, website owners can learn to improve the speed with which their web pages load.
A page is evaluated using a set of rules called Web Performance Best Practices.
The performance is an evaluation from the perspective of the user
and is
typically measured by the page load time. The page load time is
essentially
time elapsed from the moment a user requests the web page until the
moment it is fully available. The best Practices are broken into
five categories: Optimizing caching, Minimizing round trip times,
Minimizing request overhead, minimizing payload size and Optimizing
browser rendering.
There are several things that you could start doing to day to improve your website.
1.Reduce HTTP requests. Each time a browser has to show your web
page it
must contact the host server to find the required components. By
minimizing the numbers of such browser requests, you can get your page
to load a lot faster.
2.Reduce the size of HTTP cookies.
3.Scaling images in HTML can considerably increase the page speed
considerably. Avoid scaling images in HTML.
4.Make sure your Google Analytics Script is updated. This will
help
ensure that the time taken to load your web page is minimal.
Obviously this has been a very quick overview. Here is the link on How to make a website better using Google Page speed.
