Does Speed Really Matter?

Good question, but yet so much answers. I would say it depends.

I am a careful person and I would not encourage to do 120Mph in a 50Mph zone while driving because this would be reckless and dangerous, and cause you to lose your life of the lives of others. So no speeding while driving.

For the world’s fastest man, Usain Bolt, speed does matter in winning the world record.

But for this blog post, I was talking about speed in the sense of which the time that your site takes to load up. Does the page load time really matter? Yes it does.

Why Is Site Speed Important?

It Affects Your Google PageRank
If you want you to get a high enough rank on Google then your site should be fast or have a good enough speed so that you can get a good pagerank.

In April Google employee Matt Cutts announced is now incorporating site speed into their algorythm that determines search rankings.

Visit the Google Page Speed site for more information.

It Makes Your Site Stand Out More
If your site is in a competitive niche you should ideally take every known ranking factor into consideration, including how fast or how slow your website loads.

If you are competing against other sites in your niche then your site should not be taking 20 seconds to load when their site’s are taking 10 seconds. You should strive to always be on top if you do decide to compete.

It Changes The Way People View Your Site
Slow sites can make a users angry. It can make them leave your site and never come back.

Imagine you have high-speed DSL and you are loading up a site to gather some information for a project. The first page that you go on takes about a minute and a half to load up. You get a little information and you then have to search for some more. You have to then navigate yourself through that slow site with each page taking almost 2 minutes to load. Wouldn’t it be better for you to find another site so you can get your information for that project? Yes it would.

Slow sites can make us:

How To Make Your Blog Faster?

<li><strong>Optimize Images</strong>: always use the “Save for the web” feature included on image editing software. Images represent the heavier load on virtually any website so make sure you are optimizing them. Alternatively you can also turn to an online image optimizer.</li>

<li><strong>Image Formats</strong>: apart from optimizing images it is important that you choose the right format. JPEG format is suitable for photographs or true-color images. The GIF format should be used with flat-color images like logos or buttons. PNG works very similar to GIF but it supports more colors.</li>


<li><strong>Optimize Your CSS</strong>: most websites are designed with CSS nowadays. Make sure to aggregate and clean your CSS. CleanCSS is an online tool that will merge similar selectors, remove useless properties and remove the whitespace from your code.</li>


<li><strong>Use a Slash on Your Links</strong>: when a user opens a link on the form “http://www.domain.com/about” the server will need to figure what kind of file or page is contained on that address. If you include a slash (/) at the end of the link the server will already know that this is a directory page, reducing the load time of the site.</li>


<li><strong>Use the Height and Width Tags</strong>: many people forget to add the Height and Width tags on image codes. Those tags will make sure that the browser knows the size of the image before loading it. The result is that it will reserve a spot for the images while loading the rest of the page, speeding up the whole process.</li>


<li><strong>Reduce the HTTP Requests</strong>: when opening a web page every object (images, scripts and the line) will require a round trip to the server. This latency can add several seconds to the load time of your site. Make sure to reduce the number of objects and to combine CSS files and scripts together.</li>

WP-Super Cache

You can also use the WP-Super Cache plugin.

Group Discussion

In my next article I will explain why I moved my blog to Hostgator.com

<li><strong>Are you taking the necessary steps to make your site more faster?</strong></li>