Achieving a good ranking in Google means a lot to every business. Among the various factors considered for securing a good ranking, your website speed is also one of the important factors that has a great effect on the Google rankings. For years, Google has been talking about presenting the content in such a way that helps them in terms of understanding what your website is all about; now they have extended the parameters and that takes the website speed into consideration as well. This goes on to say that if your website is too slow to load, you might find your SERP’s going down.
According to Google Webmaster Central Blog; “Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to the web requests.”
Related: Website Speed Optimization – What You Need to Know About It?
It is true that many factors will be taken into consideration for the purpose of determining the search engine ranking eligibility of your website, the actual time taken for the web pages to load is a big deal. Its important to make sure that your website loads quickly. Users are happy when they can browse through your website in a short span of time; along with this a faster website also contributes in reducing the overall operating costs.
Here are some important parameters that can help you to optimize your website for achieving a better website ranking:
Reduce The HTTP Requests
Your website pages will load faster if they don’t have to wait for many HTTP requests. This means that you will have to reduce the number of items that are to be loaded; these include style sheets, scripts and images as well.
Combining CSS
Combining all of your CSS into an external file and linking to it through the section of every page instead of loading it in the HTML of a page. This enables the external page to be cached so that it is loaded faster. JavaScript must be handled in a similar way as CSS.
CSS Sprites
CSS sprites can be used wherever possible. This combines the images used in the background into one image thereby reducing the number of HTTP requests made.
Optimizing The Images
Make sure that your images are optimized for the web. In case you are working with Photoshop, all you have to do is click on ‘save for web’ instead of just clicking on ‘save’. The images can be formatted by optimizing them so that you can work with a smaller image size.
Server Caching
Server caching creates a HTML page for a URL, thereby the dynamic websites don’t have to create a page every time the URL is requested.
Use Gzip
Through Gzip the size of the page is significantly compressed when the page is sent to the browser, the browser then un-compresses the information and displays it to the user. Many websites that use Gzip are able to reduce the file size significantly for better results.
Content Delivery Network
Using a content delivery network enables your users to download information in parallel, thereby helping your website to load faster.
Reduce 301 Redirects
The 301 redirects force the browser to use a new URL and need the browser to wait for the HTTP request to come back thereby increasing the page load time. Restrict the use of 301 redirects if possible; preferably don’t stock the 301’s on top of each other.
Web hosting
The web hosting platform on which your website is functioning also makes a big difference. It has a major contribution in the loading time of your website. If the hosting server is overloaded or slow, there are possibilities that your website will take ages to load. When you select the web hosting platform, it is essential to consider all the parameters related to the functioning of the website. If you are not too sure, you can talk to any of the web hosting company representatives before making the final decision. With a powerful dedicated hosting server and a good hosting platform, website speed will always be good.
In order to achieve something phenomenal, one always has to go the extra mile; it’s the same with getting the best position in Google. If you plan search engine optimization in synchronization with the page load times, securing higher SERP’s will not be a very difficult task.
