To gain maximum benefits for SEO, Google now suggests that the websites should load faster. It not only increases the user experience but also engages the user for a longer period of time compared to a site that would load slower. Follow the strategies below to maximize the speed of loading of your websites and get better rankings with Google and other search engines.
- Nested tables are a no-no.
It takes a lot for a browser to be able to parse a table within another table. Thus, anything that requires more time parsing is not required. - Always optimize your images!
Images are the most cumbersome on the browser and have the maximum weight on many pages of websites.
· Try to reduce the amount of images on an individual page. Some buttons could just be regular link buttons with styles coded in them.
· Always define the parameters for the image like the width and height of an image. This will tell the browser exactly how the page would be laid out. If these attributes are not defined, then the image gets loaded first and then the rest of the page.
· We don’t need the fancy GIF animations anymore. Well-designed images give the user a better experience overall.
· Consider using smaller clickable thumbnails instead of big images where possible.
· Its very easy to reduce the size of your images using several tools out there like GIFCruncher, JPEG Wizard, etc.
· Use GIFs instead of JPEGs. JPEGS are only good for fine images like photos, for all other web graphics GIF is usually a better choice.
- Cleaning the clutter.
This tip may sound silly, but take a closer look at your website. Websites nowadays come with a clean, fresh look and feel. If you’re still using some 90s background music or some huge GIF animation, then you’re still in the 90s. The Web has evolved quite a bit over the last 10 years and a lot more in the last few years. Even though bandwidth has increased, you still need to clean up the unnecessary garbage from your website and update it with a cleaner look so its easier to read and understand what you’re offering to your customers. - CMS & HTML editors
Many old school WYSIWYG HTML editors and CMS editors put a lot of code like empty tags (like <font> </font>) and unnecessary comments in your source code. Always check for this by opening your pages in regular text editors like Notepad and then cleaning up all unnecessary code. - Get rid of the unnecessary whitespaces
Not only does it make the code unreadable and inconsistent in different programs but also it increases the page size if used inappropriately between the tags and new line characters
- Last but not the least, Always use CSS
You’ll do yourself and your developers a huge favor by using a linked Cascading Style Sheet, which is just a set of instructions of how to represent elements. This way your developers will be easily able to change your source code and it will be a lot lighter, and therefore load faster. For example, you could replace this code:<div align=”right”><font face=”Arial, Verdana, Sans Serif” color=”#008000″ size=”3″><b>Here is some text</b></font></div>
to something like this:
<div class=”style1″>Here is some text</div>
See how easy it is to make everyone’s life easier?