Google's Tips to Speed Up Your Site

[Webnauts]

but I think we need to do some more testing before we all run off and start changing our hosting etc.

You do not need to change your hosting. You can get CDN instead. I personally recommend these guys www.mirror-image.com because they do provide the service level they claim. Be aware that many out there give false promises!

[travelsignposts]

Thanks, morestar, I have a long way to go to catch up with you!

It occurs to me that I should mention that two scripts I had to exclude (at present) were date.js and the featured gallery js and css files when using the Studiopress Lifestyle theme (original, not Genesis). As the featured gallery plugin files turn up on every page even though the gallery is only used on the homepage this is a bit of a pain from the speed point of view.

Personally I am irritated by plugins including unused codes in my pages, it would be nice if any such plugin adopted the c-forms and snazzy archives feature of letting you choose on which page to enable it.

Tony

[morestar]

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

Awesome addition Webnauts. I primarily went by Google's site performance suggestions and according to them but one should never over-look the ones you mentioned either if they're interested in site speed.

I presume those are directives in .htaccess except for JSMIN. I like JSMIN especially if you're not going to have need to edit the file in the future which is usually the case with JavaScript files.

[deepsand]

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

HTML is a descriptive language, whose purpose is to act as an interface that describes to an application what the data are and how to present such.

Scripts are specialized procedural languages, the purpose of which is to set forth a specific sequence of algorithmic computing tasks to be performed.

While procedural languages can do the job of descriptive languages, the reverse is not so.

__________________

[NetProwler]

Images tend to be larger in file size than textual content most of the time. When you are talking of minifying JS and CSS files and caching static text, caching images is equally important. You can issue in .htaccess something like the following to do this:

<FilesMatch "\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"
</FilesMatch>

[zbatia]

I like the suggestion on speeding up the Google Analytic loading.

On another hand, folks, let's think about one simple thing: can your web site be quickly accessed by Google's bot? Do you know how many nodes are between your ISP and Google's servers? Believe or not, this can be the major factor, not the web site optimization/gzipping and stripping up the code.

If Google measures time to access your web page + time to load it in the browser (what makes sense), then, if your ISP has slow connection and you have many nodes between your ISP and Google's server, your web site optimization may have a minimal impact on results.

Here is how to check (watch for response time!):
If you have an acess to your web server, try to run the "traceroute" command to one of the Google's crawler servers. If you have the IIS server, the command would be:
Usage: tracert [-d] [-h maximum_hops] [-j host-list] [-w timeout] target_name

Options:
-d Do not resolve addresses to hostnames.
-h maximum_hops Maximum number of hops to search for target.
-j host-list Loose source route along host-list.
-w timeout Wait timeout milliseconds for each reply.
For more about this command: Using Tracert

For UNIX/Linux -based servers:
traceroute [ -dFInrvx ] [ -f first_ttl ] [ -g gateway ]
[ -i iface ] [ -m max_ttl ] [ -p port ]
[ -q nqueries ] [ -s src_addr ] [ -t tos ]
[ -w waittime ] [ -z pausemsecs ]
host [ packetlen ]

[briguy]

Not gonna claim I totally understand some of the answers posted in this thread or if if they apply to my sites (somewhat of a beginner) but

I can tell you every SEO in this forum LOVES when their pages load fast

But I did remove some of my "comment codes" and the blank spaces from my coding (like this>)

--></p></center>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

to

</p></center></div></div></div></div>

from one of my sites and the "file size" went from 16.4 kb to 15.2 kb.

Which (correct me if I am wrong) should at least help my page load faster.

Since I not sure if this was mentioned..but if I "optimized my images" by using a "free image optimizer" (did read NetProwler caching your image posting) that should also lessen the "size" of my site and improve it loading time..?

[morestar]

Oh yes absolutely. When I referenced JSMIN that was in reference to JavaScript files but if you're doing it with your HTML files too that's fantastic! Good going!

[briguy]

Oh yes absolutely. When I referenced JSMIN that was in reference to JavaScript files but if you're doing it with your HTML files too that's fantastic! Good going!

Thanks for the fast response! Will also look into "cleaning up" the free javascript coding on my site (statcounter etc)..of course gonna leave the "adsense" alone lol!

Also proud to say that I backed up my site before doing my experiment lol!

[murphypj]

[QUOTE=briguy;508660]Will also look into "cleaning up" the free javascript coding on my site (statcounter etc)..of course gonna leave the "adsense" alone lol!

Can I throw a curveball question in at this point - the mention of StatCounter in this post was a trigger for me.

I have dipped my toes in the SEO waters since taking early retirement recently, based on over 10 years of optimizing my own site, and some considerable success at optimizing sites for family and friends - all of which I have to thank the moderators and contributors to WPW site and forum I was lucky enough to discover in the early days of trying to attract traffic to my own site.

In presenting the proposal/review document to one of my clients, I highlighted that his homepage was taking 16-17 secs to load, with a message to the effect "Statcounter loading". I took copies of his pages and files for optimization, removed the StatCounter code. and the page loaded immediately. I recommended that he remove SC and either rely on G WMT+Google Analytics, or use an alternative free stats tool ( I use AddFreeStats on my own site and can see from webpagetest.org that it has minimal effect on load time ).

At our meeting he seemed surprised, and showed me the site loading quickly on his PC. Thinking it might be a local caching situation, I asked a few family members to try loading the site, and they all report quick load times.

I checked it again on my PC on Firefox, IE, and Chrome - still takes up to 20 seconds to load. Tried it on my wife's laptop and it loads in a few seconds, using the same wireless connection and ISP.

I haven't encountered any problems with any other site's JS ( including my own ), and can't figure how this is only happening on my own PC. Obviously if this is some PC setting issue, I need to resolve it before I give bad advice to other clients. On the other hand, if it is due to a setting that might be present on a high % of searchers' PCs, then it is an issue for my client, who is understandably reluctant to change from a set of statistics he's familiar with.

In the light of this thread, and the pre-existing importance of fast load times, I would really appreciate if anyone here could share their experience with StatCounter, or suggest some reason why the problem so far seems local to my PC ( I have only asked about 4 others, but they all report no problem ). I am fairly sure that back in the old dialup days, I removed SC from my own site because of the delay factor.

I don't want to give bad press to a good free stats program if this is some obscure local issue, but I'm obviously concerned that other searchers for my client's services might be experiencing the same problem, which is very likely to cause them to hit the back button.

The site is a .IE site, and the company is Taste Restaurant, so if you remove the space, add the .IE TLD and use lowercase, perhaps one or two of you would be kind enough to check load times from outside of Ireland, and let me know if it's just me!!

Thanks again for the tremendous help throughout the years.

PJ