Even in this age of high speed connections and wireless connectivity everywhere, many websites and eCommerce platforms fail to render pages at the speed for which users expect. By maximizing your site speed and performance you will not only undoubtedly offer your users a better experience, but now will also realize improvements within your organic search positioning.
Recently Google made an announcement that stated that site speed was factored into their ranking algorithms for their organic index. This was not a surprise to most veteran SEO’s but to hear it come out in an official announcement made it even more of a priority then it may have been previously.
Here is Google’s official announcement relating to site speed and SEO.
If you are on a licensed eCommerce platform chances are you may have some issues. These issues become even more magnified when your site uses numerous types of active http connections within Javascript, CSS, and other types of scripting logic.
If you are worried about your site performance don’t be. Everything can be fixed, you just need to know what to improve. A great place to start is to use the free tool YSlow, which is a firefox plug-in.
YSlow will help essentially evaluate your code base and provide details into what site elements need to be optimized. A-F grades are provided across a plethora of areas to help you in understanding the depth of your issues and which issues are the most paramount to fix.
To get “A’s” across the board will be a bit of a challenge, but to make slow and steady improvements by tackling one performance aspect at a time (i.e. external javascript files) will help improve your speed in a sustainable manner.
Another great tool to check out is WebPageTest which offers much of the same data as Yslow in many different formats. It also provides great tools to see a “waterfall” of all your page elements and the time and sequence for which they load in a web browser for your visitors.
We highly recommend these two tools for diagnosing your speed issues and we look forward to seeing your site perform faster in browsers and rank higher in search engines!
Interested in our services?
Contact Us
