CATCHING THE COMPETITION 

Will the World Wide Web soon become the World Wild Web where the fastest runners rule? 

The world’s largest search engine – Google, has injected a new ranking factor into its search algorithm – site speed. It is pushing towards a faster web where web pages can be turned as quickly as those of a book. 

For anyone thinking of designing or developing a website this is a new and important change. What it means is that Google will start recognising faster websites ahead of slower ones in search results along with content, keywords and links. Under this new order of ranking, slower sites may eventually find it harder to rank higher. 

While you shouldn’t really bother to become the fastest website on the globe what you really should care about is whether your site’s loading speed catches up with those that tweak their sites to load much faster. They could be your competitors. This is particularly relevant if your site happens to depend on Google rankings for traffic as does a wide and vast majority of websites. 

SECONDS DO COUNT 

Interestingly enough, websites in the past were rarely penalised for having slow load times. But, if you increase your website’s page load time you often will see positive results that include increased page rankings which could lead to more visitors over time. Also, another equally important reason for faster page load times is user experience. 

Here are a few simple ways you can increase page load time:

• Use fewer photos and videos: If your page is heavily packed with large files like photo albums and videos, they will cause your page load time to slow down.  Try deleting some of these from your pages.
• Use external files wisely: If you have a lot of CSS or Java Script on a page, put it into separate files and reference those files on your page instead. This simple technique lightens up your page load time. It works because when a browser tries to read your page it loads elements it finds on the page and calls out for the external files only when it needs them.
• Reduce image sizes: Large-sized images take up a lot of data space. Consequently, it causes your page to load slower.

If your page loads about average and you manage to increase page load speed by just a few nanoseconds, it likely won’t be of much help to you. But if your page loads just a few seconds below average but manage to decrease it by just a second-and-a-half it could be a significant factor in future rankings for your targeted keywords.

There are, of course, some other variables that operate on page load speed but the general idea is to create a faster web. Since Google logs over 2 billion searches a day, more people expect faster page load times. Search engines like Google, it now seems, want to reward those sites that deliver on that demand.

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