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
-
How long does Google take to reduce the index size?
A few months ago, we have incorporated our custom search in our website www.ergodotisi.com . We hadn't been paying a lot of attention to our webmaster analytics, to find out a few months later than the Google Index had grown from 2K- 3K pages to one million because it was crawling all combinations of search filters. We have now followed the right instructions to add noindex meta tags and blocked most search result pages from the robot.txt. We allow indexing of some main categories by setting new seo-friendly url structures. A few weeks have passed and the index size has only reduced to 700K. How long does it take before it removes most of the duplicated search result pages from the index? Is it still crawling those pages but has not fully decided to remove most of them? How bad is this for SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | cplastiras840 -
How can I redirect anything after the article url to main article?
Hello everyone, When someone visits my websites article like http://www.website.com/article-title/lol , it give to 404 page error. But when someone http://www.website.com/article-title/ , it shows the article. The word "lol" can be changed to anything. I would like that to be redirected to the main article. Example: Someone visits website.com/article-title/lol, they should be redirected to website.com/article-title/ Is it possible to do so? If yes, please tell me how. Note: I'm using WordPress Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | hakhan2011 -
Can you canonical from one domain page to a different domain page
We are a boating site and have our main site with all it's products. We have an engine section within our main site. But we also have an outside domain, specific to a certain manufacturer of engines. So we want our customers to still find the engine information for this manufacturer within our main site, as well as find the manufacturer targeted engine site in the SERPS. My question is this: Can I canonical those pages within our main site to pages on the outside domain? Or does are canonicals to be used only within the same domain? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | tdawson090 -
How Can I Fix Adobe Bridge Photo Galleries and Duplicate Content?
I have used the Adobe bridge program for a number of photo galleries on a remodeling site and it is showing a large amount of duplicate titles, etc. Is there an easy fix to this? anyone?
On-Page Optimization | | DaveBrown3330 -
It is NOW time to invest in SEO consultant, How/ Where can i find a good one???
I have learn the basics of seo and use seoMoz for more then a year. this help me to rank my online store better and increase sales. I only know the basics of seo and it is now time increase traffics to our online store, www.furnacefilterscanada.com How can I hired a good seo consultant? I'm self employes and the only one managing my online store. I want to be shure I invest in a good consultant. Our small business does not have thousand$$$$$ dollards to invest. For example, can I see result if I invest $1000? Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | BigBlaze2050 -
Does the positioning of the text on a webpage matter for search engines?
Does the positioning of the text on a webpage matter for search engines? Do you need to place the text at the upperside of a webpage or is at the bottom also a good option?
On-Page Optimization | | HMK-NL0 -
Re-optimizing onsite SEO, can it hurt?
We finished the re-design of our website a few months ago. We have hired a few freelance SEO guys that were horrible. We then decided to pull the SEO work in-house. I got nominated to do the SEO work. I started with what I thought was pretty good on-site SEO. At that time, with no experience, I was pretty proud of myself. I managed to get a bunch of our pages at top SERPs for long-tail keywords. Good enough for then. Now when I go look at the pages, I'm embarrassed to admit that it's my work. Please be kind. 🙂 Since then I have been trying to learn as much as possible about SEO. I'm certainly far ahead of where I was a few months ago. For the past few weeks I've been trying to focus my efforts on creating original keyword rich original content. Our competitors all have tried this, but their content is hardly readable by humans. Anyhow, we finished our fist article, it got indexed by G almost immediately and started to push our keyword SERPs up within just a few days. Now for my question. I have a much better understanding of on-page SEO and realize that I could make many improvements to ALL of our other pages. However, these pages are already doing fairly well with the SERPS and are moving up a few ranks a week. I'm very tempted to throw caution to the wind and completely redo all of our on-page SEO for our entire site. Is this a good strategy?
On-Page Optimization | | dmac
Should I expect our SERPs to drop a little, a lot, or not at all? I look forward to your response. DMac0