How can I reduce my webpage load time?
-
According to google
'On average, pages in your site take 4.6 seconds to load (updated on Apr 3, 2011). This is slower than 71% of sites. These estimates are of low accuracy (fewer than 100 data points). The chart below shows how your site's average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.'
My website: http://ablemagazine.co.uk
I've installed Cache plugins, Minify plugins, reduce the amount of posts on my main page. But my website is still taking too long to load and I'm afraid I'm being penalised for it.
Any tips?
-
The logo actually reduces a whole lot via smush.it, so that can help a little. Have you looked at the graphic elements that came with the theme that you didn't necessarily create?
Yahoo's Y!Slow extension for Firefox can also point out a lot of other areas for speeding up the site.
-
Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately I already compress all my images with photoshop so the savings with smush.it are usually less than 500Bytes. I suppose it all helps!
-
Keep in mind that (to the best of my knowledge) Google is pulling the above data just from visitors that have the Google Toolbar installed, and does have a low number of data points for this conclusion.
In looking at your current home page, I'd say the image file sizes are something you can easily work on to help speed load time and increase user experience. In Firefox, right click on any image, and click View Image Information. It should take you to the Media tab of the Page Info dialog, and show you all of the media you have on that page, including background images.
Your theme files are large in some cases. The main-right.jpg file is 20k, header.jpg is 35k. Your logo is a 12k png. There are also several post images in the 20-40k range.
Yahoo has a tool called Smush.it which offers lossless compression, and there is even a Wordpress plugin that will compact new photos on upload, and reduce file sizes of existing images in the media library on demand http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smushit/. For time invested, the plugin is probably the easiest fix to reduce your file size and speed up your page load time, in addition to fixing the images in your theme.
-
Page load time is a very small factor for website ranking, but this could be done :
Regroup CSS in a single file, same for javascripts. Make a CSS sprite for the background images.
Add expires and gzip in your htaccess file if you can :
<ifmodule expires_module="">ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/bmp "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/ico "modification plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/vnd.microsoft.icon "modification plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType application/ico "modification plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/icon "modification plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "modification plus 1 year"</ifmodule><ifmodule deflate_module="">AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/php text/html text/txt text/javascript text/css application/javascript application/x-javascript</ifmodule>
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is it a good practice to reduce number of redirections (301) after a period of time?
Is it good to use disavow tool and get rid of old URLs i.e. links for pages and posts which we have deleted from our website and added 301 on them?
On-Page Optimization | | Ravi_Rana0 -
Can I reuse meta description tag on another site?
Hi....lets say i sell widgets and on my site i have redWidgets, blueWidgets and greenWidgets. Each of these widget page's has a meta description tag that seems to help click through. I now have a different site that would like to do a right up about each widget and will dedicate a independent page to each widget. Can i safely provide them with the original meta descriptions (from my original site) for each widget i have on my site to then use on these "right up" pages (as they seem to work well and are informative of the subject matter). I am not sure if this is a seo issue or not. I would think not but would appreciate any input. thank you
On-Page Optimization | | nomad-2023230 -
Async JavaScript page load times affect on ranking.
Our company plan to use in our product page a live chat support app. But I concern about the page load time. The script is loading asynchronous and in the inner tests increase the average page load time with around one sec. Previously the load time was between 2.5-3.3 sec after the chat support increased to 3.8-5 sec, but sometimes there was extreme +10 sec worse results. My question is how much can this impact to our search engine rankings?
On-Page Optimization | | laszlo_muhi0 -
Can we rank website without main keywords on its homepage?
For example my company website on Google Search Engine... Web Design Company & Digital Agency in Jakarta
On-Page Optimization | | Japracool
coriate.com/
Coriate is a website design & Internet marketing firm in Indonesia. We offer the best web solutions, digital advertising, and SEO Services in the industry. Can I do backlink to it, but different keywords? Like Social Media Management or Facebook Like?0 -
How can i make my sub-domain bring in more traffic?
we have a social networking site that has user-generated content and users have to log in before they can access the platform. We are in the process of creating indexable pages that google bots can pick up. These pages will sit in front of the log in pages and will be open for guest access. Can you advise on the best way of optimising these pages for higher ranking and traffic.
On-Page Optimization | | seoworx1230 -
Schema business address - can this affect me in the national rankings
Looking at using Schema microdata on our new website, we currently rank quite decently in Google UK. If I was to add schema mark up for our business address could this effect us in Google UK rankings wise i.e. our rankings for national search (for want of a better word!) suffer but our local rankings increase?
On-Page Optimization | | Jon-C0 -
How many times should a word appear in an article?
Hi My site is maily about growing fruit and vegetables and was badly hit after the September Panda update. Each page is about one type of fruit or vegetable and discusses how to grow that particular plant. Each page targets two keyword phrases, "growing abc" and "how to grow abc" so e.g. "Growing garlic: a guide on how to grow garlic" would be the page title and then the two phrases used a couple of times on each page. However the plant, in the above example "garlic" can appear upto 30 or 40 times per page, also the phrases "how to grow" and "growing" will appear on just about every page, would these facts be hurting my overall site rankings? Many Thanks Simon
On-Page Optimization | | spes1230 -
Can internal duplicate content cause issues?
Hello all mozzers - has anyone used nitrosell? we use them only because their inventory connects to ours epos point but because they have thousands of 301s on our domain we are getting duplicate content because different sizes of products (we sell womenswear) are creating seperate URLS so we are duplicating both content and URLS - im curious as to whether anyone has experienced simillar problems that have affected their SERPS? Best wishes, Chris
On-Page Optimization | | DaWillow1