An important factor that is taken into account by search engines such as google, yahoo and bing when they are determining the ranking and importance of your website is how long will it take your site to load. Humans too will decide how importance of your site based in part on how long it takes to get the information they are looking for.
You can check this information for yourself by using tools such as the google webmaster which shows you under the diagnostics section the crawler statistics for your site such as Pages crawled per day, Kilobytes downloaded per day & Time spent downloading a page.
Google webmaster also has a new tool currently under development in their lab section that allows you to review the speed at which your page loads using the firebug extension for firefox. The page speed plugin for the firebug extension analysis’s the speed at which your website loads and makes recommendations for improving the speed at which your site will load.
The easiest way to improve your page loading time would be to go for a simple 1 page site with no flash, java, links or images. This may give an incredibly quick loading website but pure text on a site no matter how well optimised for search engine spiders is not going to inspire humans to return to your site. Unlike the search engine spiders humans need visual stimulus to maintain interest.
One of the easiest ways to improve website loading times is to optimise the images on your site. A website owner came to Enterprise Host recently having built a site themselves unable to understand why their site was taking so long load. After analysising their site for them we were able to determine that by reducing the size of one picture on the site they would be able to reduce the load time of their site by a massive 54%. They had added a picture to the site which displayed on the site as 325 pixels by 255 pixels (for comparison thumb nail images are normally 150 pixels by 150 pixels) so not a large file you might think. Wrong!- They had taken the picture on a mobile phone and then simply loaded it up to the site. The actual picture was 2885 pixels by 1821 pixels (it would take at least 4 pc monitors screens to display the image full size). The size of this file was a massive 4.8mb, not large for your laptop or pc at home but when loading web pages this can seriously slow down load times. By optimising the image we were able to reduce the file size from 4.8mb to 96kb and improve load times by 54% ! A great improvement.
If you have only basic IT skills don’t worry you don’t need any specialist programs or skills to optimise images. You pc/laptop probably has the software preinstalled. Photo Editor which comes preinstalled with Microsoft Windows will do the job simply for you. If you are using ubuntu you can dowload gimp for free and this will do the job for you. You can use free online software such as Resizr or Picnik.
Remember its probably worth keeping a full size version of the picture on your local pc as well in case you ever want to use a larger size as well.
For help and advice on web hosting, domain registration, website design and website management contact Enterprise Host.
