Website Load Speed Matters
The speed that your web pages loads is vital to your rankings in search, especially Google. Loading faster should be one of your primary targets for good SEO.
How do you make your site load faster?
First, if you suspect that your pages are not loading very quickly, you need to check them. The best free tool for this is YSlow for Firefox or Chrome which will show you not only how quickly your pages are but what is slowing them down.
Aim for a speed score of 80/100 or more as a minimum value. Ideally you want 90/100 or more.
Google measures website load speed, and across all websites in its index, considers the fastest 20% to be the ideal benchmark. The remaining 80% will need to speed up their sites in time as the 20th percentile will continue to improve as sites get faster and faster.
Main Causes of Slow Site Loading
When your website is viewed by someone, each element that makes up your page is fetched from your server as a separate DNS request.
Each image, style sheet, plug in, java script, video etc are all separate requests and each on takes time to retrieve. The less requests your page requires, the faster it will load.
1. Images
Your images ideally need to be less that 30kb each, if you have multiple images on a page combine then into a sprite so that they download as one larger image and server specific pixels where you want them on your page.
This is much faster than downloading individual images.
2. Gzip
Gzip compression is a no brainer for speeding up site speed. Activate Gzip if it isn’t already.
3. Multiple DNS requests
Many sites use multiple CSS style sheets. Combine these into one single style sheet as it will load much quicker.