What's our easiest, quickest "win" for page load speed?
-
This is a follow up question to an earlier thread located here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/we-just-fixed-a-meta-refresh-unified-our-link-profile-and-now-our-rankings-are-going-crazy
In that thread, Dr. Pete Meyers said "You'd really be better off getting all that script into external files."
Our IT Director is willing to spend time working on this, but he believes it is a complicated process because each script must be evaluated to determine which ones are needed "pre" page load and which ones can be loaded "post."
Our IT Director went on to say that he believes the quickest "win" we could get would be to move our SSL javascript for our SSL icon (in our site footer) to an internal page, and just link to that page from an image of the icon in the footer. He says this javascript, more than any other, slows our page down.
My question is two parts:
1. How can I verify that this javascript is indeed, a major culprit of our page load speed?
2. Is it possible that it is slow because so many styles have been applied to the surrounding area? In other words, if I stripped out the "Secured by" text and all the syles associated with that, could that effect the efficiency of the script?
3. Are there any negatives to moving that javascript to an interior landing page, leaving the icon as an image in the footer and linking to the new page?
Any thoughts, suggestions, comments, etc. are greatly appreciated!
Dana
-
Thanks Stremline. Yes, it was clear from this report from Pingdom.com that our SSL validation icon was the biggest culprit bogging down our pagespeed. We are moving the JS to an interior page and then linking to that page via the .gif image icon to see if this helps.
After that, is seems our next biggest culprits could be images. Some of them are association images that could easily be combined into one optimized image.
The two "problem child" javscripts seem to be "iaf.js" and "CCI-utils.js" - Although I don't code javascript I believe these pertain to site functions like the popout navigation menus.
Awesome tool. Thank you. Do you have any developer tools that can help determine when javascripts load (pre versus post), etc. Thoughts?
Thanks again!
Dana
-
1. Here's a tool to show what takes the longest to load on your page - http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
Let me know if JavaScript is in fact the culprit here and I can provide some additional help.
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
-
Dealing with broken internal links/404s. What's best practice?
I've just started working on a website that has generated lots (100s) of broken internal links. Essentially specific pages have been removed over time and nobody has been keeping an eye on what internal links might have been affected. Most of these are internal links that are embedded in content which hasn't been updated following the page's deletion. What's my best way to approach fixing these broken links? My plan is currently to redirect where appropriate (from a specific service page that doesn't exist to the overall service category maybe?) but there are lots of pages that don't have a similar or equivalent page. I presume I'll need to go through the content removing the links or replacing them where possible. My example is a specific staff member who no longer works there and is linked to from a category page, should i be redirecting from the old staff member and updating the anchor text, or just straight up replacing the whole thing to link to the right person? In most cases, these pages don't rank and I can't think of many that have any external websites linking to them. I'm over thinking all of this? Please help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | Adam_SEO_Learning0 -
Google page speed testing failures
When running our domain through google's page speed insights I'm getting the error message 'An error occurred while fetching or analyzing the page' at around 65% load. I'm concerned it's affecting our organic rankings. The domain is https://www.scottscastles.com/ When testing in https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/ it is also failing at around 70% with the message 'It's taking longer than expected. You can leave this tab open and check back in a little while. We'll have your results soon.' but the results never come. I've tried testing on a few different speed testing sites without failures (https://tools.pingdom.com, https://gtmetrix.com, https://www.webpagetest.org and a few others). We’re stumped as everything appears correct and was working but now isn't. Is this Google or us, or a combination of the two? Any help greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | imaterus0 -
Rel="canonical"
Hello guys, By fixing the duplicate meta description issues of my site I noticed something a bit weird.The pages are product pages and the product on each one of them is the same and the only difference is the length of the product. On each page there is a canonical tag, and the link within the tag points to the same page. www.example.com/Product/example/2001 <rel="canonical" href="www.example.com/Product/example/2001"></rel="canonical"> This happens on every other page. I read twice and I think I will do it again the post on GWT and I think that is wrong as it should point to a different url, which is www.example.com/ProductGroup/example/ which is the the page where all the product are grouped together. Cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Just read Travis Loncar's YouMoz post and I have a question about Pagination
This was a brilliant post. I have a question about Pagination on sites that are opting to use Google Custom Search. Here is an example of a search results page from one of the sites I work on: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/search-return?q=countryman I notice in the source code of sequential pages that the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags are not used. I also noticed that the URL does not change when clicking on the numbers for the subsequent pages of the search results. Also, the canonical tag of every subsequent page looks like this: Are you thinking what I'm thinking? All of our Google Custom Search pages have the same canonical tag....Something's telling me this just can't be good. Questions: 1. Is this creating a duplicate content issue? 2. If we need to include rel="prev" and rel="next" on Google Custom Search pages as well as make the canonical tag accurate, what is the best way to implement this? Given that searchers type in such a huge range of search terms, it seems that the canonical tags would have to be somehow dynamically generated. Or, (best case scenario!) am I completely over-thinking this and it just doesn't matter on dynamically driven search results pages? Thanks in advance for any comments, help, etc.
Technical SEO | | danatanseo1 -
Page rank 2 for home page, 3 for service pages
Hey guys, I have noticed with one of our new sites, the home page is showing page rank two, whereas 2 of the internal service pages are showing as 3. I have checked with both open site explorer and yahoo back links and there are by far more links to the home page. All quality and relevant directory submissions and blog comments. The site is only 4 months old, I wonder if anyone can shed any light on the fact 2 of the lesser linked pages are showing higher PR? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nextman0 -
Will a "blog=example "parameter at the end of my URLs affect google's crawling them?
For example, I'm wondering if www.example.com/blog/blog-post is better than www.example.com/blog/blog-post?blog=example? I'm currently using the www.example.com/blog/blog-post?blog=example structure as our canonical page for content. I'm also wondering, if the parameter doesn't affect crawling, if it would hurt rankings in any way. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Intridea0 -
TLD - ".com.br" X ".com" which to use?
Hello I'm starting an SEO work on a site that has the domain "www.dominiodocliente.com" and "www.dominiodocliente.com.br." The problem is that the domain name. ".com" already has a low rank for keywords chosen as the domain "Com.br" has no rank. On the other hand, the domain ". Com" has 224 results in google as the domain "Com.br" has 1970 results. My question is: Which domain should I focus on SEO work? Tks
Technical SEO | | eder.machado0 -
I am wondering if I should use the Meta 'Cache" tag?
I am working on removing unnecessary meta tags that have little impact on SEO and I have read so many mixed reviews about using the Meta 'Cache' tag. I need to informative information on whether or not this tag should be used.
Technical SEO | | ImagetecLP0