Is Your Website Fast Enough To Rank Well?

If you want your site to rank well in Google, it needs to load FAST!

Its no secret that the search engines, want websites to load quickly, and if your site is not competing, it may be that your site just needs a bit of loving care and attention.

Each time we add an image, a plugin or a script to our sites, it will take a little longer to load, as it needs to read the code.

So as we grow our site, and add more content and images, the load time will become even slower still.

So what can we do about it?

Many of the problems associated with slow load times, can be fixed quite easily, badly coded plug ins can be replaced with a better one, images can be reduced in size, a caching and minify plug in can be installed to help.

But firstly we need to Analyse WHAT is causing our sites to load slowly

To do this you can use a free tool at

http://gtmetrix.com/

Open the site and type in your URL.

Let it do its thing, and it will give you a result using a traffic light system and an overall score.

Here's a screenshot of a result I have just run on my site

And The Results Are In!

As you can see that the results are green, and load time is good (Considering I have a lot of images on my home page!)

The red and amber areas, at the top of the list, are the areas that need improving, and these are the ones that should be worked on

Once you have run the test on your own site, look at the recommendation list, these are live links that will enable you to drill deeper into areas that need attention

You will now be able to address each of the problems to enable your site to load faster and be more Google/visitor friendly.

Now you are not looking to get 100% page speed grade - as there are often things that cant be easily changed.

What you are aiming for is a GREEN page speed, but the faster the better.

Unfortunately I am unable to list every possible scenario or 'how to fix' here, but if you have an issue that needs to be fixed and you are not sure how, post a question here at WA and I am sure you will be offered a solution.