Web Page Optimization: Avoiding the World Wide Wait

Think visitors are happy to wait for your site to load? Dream on. The good old days when we could expect visitors to cheerfully adhere to the golden two-second rule are over. According to Microsoft’s Harry Shum, that magical number is rapidly approaching 250ms. Blink your eyes and you’ll miss it: modern internet users want your site to load yesterday. If you want visitors to hang around and see what you’ve got to offer, you have to consider speed as the most important feature of your site.

Web page optimization is often confused with search engine optimization. Let’s be clear: effective SEO depends on all the important but fluffy shit like engaging in “the conversation” on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, building the right kind of inbound links, content marketing and so forth, while optimizing a website for maximum performance means drilling right down into the internal metrics of your site, the veritable nuts and bolts if you like.

In order to set things right, you need to know what’s causing the issue. Make it simple on yourself and imagine your site as two sides of a coin: the frontend and the backend. The frontend, with its heavy content, client side code like JavaScript, HTML5 and Ajax, and love of social media sharing icons, is likely to be causing the majority of the bottleneck. Take a look at the best practices for website performance provided by the Yahoo Developer Network. It’s going to run you through riveting tasks like ensuring fewer HTTP requests, avoiding 404s and optimizing images. It’s fairly boring unless you’re a geek, but definitely worth it. If you’d rather lick sand, find a friendly geek to do it for you.

So let’s say you (or the friendly geek) do all you can to get your site loading faster than shit off a shovel. What can you expect in return for your efforts? Aside from the undying love of Google et al, a number of things:

- Improved Organic Search Engine Ranking: Yes, the god that is Google looks at latency and page load time while fervently working out where your site should rank.

- Faster Crawl Times: The Googlebot spider will act like it’s on fire and crawl twice as many pages. The more it crawls, the more of your site gets indexed.

- More Moolah: Amazon loses 1% of sales for every additional 100ms it takes their site to load. If it works for Amazon….

Let’s get real here: Although web performance optimization can result in some great wins, that fluffy shit mentioned earlier (inbound marketing and the like), you have to do that too. It’s all pieces of the same puzzle.

Sources

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=158541
http://www.strangeloopnetworks.com/assets/PDF/downloads/Strangeloop-Website-Optimiz


By Linda Forshaw
http://blog.salescrunch.com/