Google's Tips to Speed Up Your Site

[inertia]

I think for most of us the site speed issue still isn't an issue to be hugely concerned about. I get the impression from Matts post that it's only going to be an issue for sites that are very slow. It's good to have the confirmation that this is now definitely a ranking feature but I think we need to do some more testing before we all run off and start changing our hosting etc.

If a client comes to me with a very slow site that is under performing then I'll address the issue and follow the excellent tips above but the most I've done so far is add WP-Supercache to my Wordpress clients sites. Am I behind the game? I just dont want to spend hours working to lower page load by amounts unnoticeable to the visitor.

[Chargin]

I wonder if they give any credit to a site that is on its own server with its own unique IP address. IE not on a shared VPS or something similar.

[deepsand]

I wonder if they give any credit to a site that is on its own server with its own unique IP address. IE not on a shared VPS or something similar.

As such does not guarantee any particular speed advantage over that of another, why should that be on any import?

A dedicated server can still be a dog.

__________________

[morestar]

If a client comes to me with a very slow site that is under performing then I'll address the issue and follow the excellent tips above but the most I've done so far is add WP-Supercache to my Wordpress clients sites. Am I behind the game? I just dont want to spend hours working to lower page load by amounts unnoticeable to the visitor.

See it's quite clear that there isn't a switch that Google's going to hit that will suddenly cause slower loading websites to lose rankings. For all we know it was a ranking factor already and just wasn't made public as the other ranking factors still aren't. I can tell you every SEO in this forum LOVES when their pages load fast and have an inkling of a feeling that Google will, well, you know what I'm talking about...

But it's here, speed as a ranking factor is here and we can't do a thing about it other than discover if we can make our sites quicker!

inertia, you pointed out that you use WP Super Cache to speed up the loading of your Wordpress install - good move I'll say but there's one big problem I've just discovered:

Most Wordpress plugins come with their own set of style sheets (usually one). If 5 of our plugins use a stylesheet there will definitely and without a doubt be five calls to the server for those 5 different files.

If we combine the styles in those stylesheets we may encounter some issues after the next plugin update.

Not good. Is Wordpress going to address this issue? We shall see.

[inertia]

Yeah. One of the reasons I'm so slack with updating WP and plugins is due to the hacking about I've done to get things to work the way I want.

The problem that I have with one client in particular is that they have a developer who does the work and I breeze in afterwards and SEO it. With these guys (and they have some custom plugins), they don't want me to do stuff like squash style sheets down. They also have JS which contains PHP so I can't move it off page (some advice here would be appreciated as I'm not the best programmer in the world???) so my hands are tied and their load times arent the best.

Seems a bit harsh for Google to "penalise" these sites? And ti be honest, I don't think they have lost rankings because of this.

[full house]

Is there any way to make it html coding rather than script?

[morestar]

The problem that I have with one client in particular is that they have a developer who does the work and I breeze in afterwards and SEO it. With these guys (and they have some custom plugins), they don't want me to do stuff like squash style sheets down. They also have JS which contains PHP so I can't move it off page (some advice here would be appreciated as I'm not the best programmer in the world???) so my hands are tied and their load times arent the best.

Seems a bit harsh for Google to "penalise" these sites? And ti be honest, I don't think they have lost rankings because of this.

I'm not too sure about the harshness in any event right? For the sake of the greater good (user experience) it would seem like a good idea to load the next best site in the list for a particular search if the other ranking site was taking days to load - I suspect.

One of my Wordpress installs was taking over 30 seconds to load at one point and I could agree with Google if they emailed me and said, hey man, you need to get that loading issue resolved because our users are going somewhere else to search. You know!!?

[travelsignposts]

Most Wordpress plugins come with their own set of style sheets (usually one). If 5 of our plugins use a stylesheet there will definitely and without a doubt be five calls to the server for those 5 different files.

I've been using Frerderick Townes' W3 Totalcache which combines css files and (separately) js files amongst many other features. So far I've only had a little trouble with particular scripts not working when combined, and it was simply a matter of excluding them. You can also choose which scripts to combine on different pages, which covers situations where a script only loads on say, the archive page.

However, it's not all plain sailing. After upgrading to the latest version of W3 Totalcache I found that a script which could earlier be combined had to be excluded (don't know why), so you do have to keep an eye out for this.

Having said that, it seems to me that this is currently the most advanced wordpress caching etc. plugin, and I suspect a lot of it is destined to be included in future wordpress code.

Tony Page

[morestar]

W3 Total Cache, well that is some great advice and information Tony and welcome to WebProWorld.com. Your first post was a doozy!!

Also, I just posted a question in the Wordpress forum regarding site speed, Wordpress and combining CSS files. This looks like good news - maybe...

I can still see issues with this though, such as the one you just indicated Tony and possible future problems as well. It'd be nice if this solution was actually built into the chore Wordpress files.

[Webnauts]

Morestar very nice thread and tips.

On the fly I can only tell that I am still missing:

1. Enabling Keep-Alive;
2. Images (Gif & PNG) compressions via Gzip;
3. ImageSprites;
4. Caching Static Text;
5. Minifying JS;
6. CDN (Content Delivery Network);
7. Unset (Disable) Etags.

Sorry if someone else mentioned. I scanned the thread very quick.

I will revisit and check if I missed anything else.