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Your Website In The Fast Lane: Speedy SEO (Part1)

virginiaseo.org /blog/your-website- in- the-f ast- lane-speed-and-seo-part-1/

Adys Lynn Dill

This is the f irst part in a series on SEO and speed! You can see the second part here:https://www.virginiaseo.org/blog/your-website- in- the-f ast- lane-speed-and-seo-part-2

Tobias Noyes of colonialdrivingschool.com was recently contacted by a visitor to his website. Thevisitor sent him a message along the lines of , “I recently arrived on your website and I noticed thatit was a litt le bit sluggish and slow.” I have experienced the same things with my own blog and hereare some tips I took to speed things up. He outlined a link that linked back to his blog andcontained some inf ormation regarding speeding up a WordPress site. This is a really thoughtf uland helpf ul thing f or a random visitor to do, even if there were hidden motives (af f iliatemarketing).

Speeeeeeeed

So let’s discuss website speed and how it af f ects your search engine optimization. Your websitespeed af f ects two dif f erent areas of your search engine optimization, f irst it af f ects the userexperience and is probably the biggest item on this list. When users arrive at your site, does ittake your page a while to load? Are the pages and images loading seconds af ter the page itselfloads? Does your page f lash up on styled bef ore the CSS stylesheets load up? What about yourslider pager, are they slowing the other things down on your website?

The User Experience

All of these things af f ect the user experiencenegatively- which is bad! Designing f or the userexperience is your top priority not only as adesigner but also as a search engineoptimization savvy user. There are some reallygreat ways to test the speed of your websiteand one of the f irst and best ways is to…Browse the website. Send an email to yourf riends and have them go and look over thewebsite. Ask your visitors through comments,blog posts or f orums what they think about thespeed of your website. Take all that f eedback and compile it together and get an overall picture ofhow your users actually f eel about your website. I was under the impression when I launch mywebsite that it was f ast until our user spoke up and told me that it was slow. This led me toinvestigate deeper and I realize that what I considered f ast and what my users considered f astare not necessarily the same thing. Now that you have your baseline, depending on whether yourwebsite is f ast or not, there are a whole bunch of things that you can do to speed things up.These include things like modif ying the code, compressing images, using a content deliverynetwork, or modif ying your theme. As a warning, some of these items may be pretty technical innature, and not something average web user or small business owner will be able to do. All ofthese items should be something that your web designer can do, so if it f eels too technical f oryou, just send a quick email to your web designer and ask them to take care of it. There are

several categories that break the speed of your website:

Hosting

Hosting is a very broad subject. Hosting is the actual Web server that’s running your website.There is a wide variety of dif f erent hosting companies out there, and pretty much every websiteyou see is going to be built of f of a dif f erent one. I could sit here all day and argue f or one hostor another, but you are going to go with the host that you want or what your web designer toldyou to go with. I recommend BlueHost, and I do not recommend GoDaddy, to be honest. Yourhosting provider has many dif f erent plans which you can purchase to host your website. Theseplans vary such as an economy shared plan all the way to a dedicated server. You can payaccording to the amount of hardware you want running your website. When you go f or the budgethost such as GoDaddy, you are getting a poor hosting package. This hosting package has adirect ef f ect on the speed of your website. My website Virginia SOL was running on a deluxe planat GoDaddy when I decided to switch over to a virtual private server on BlueHost. The speedincrease was visually apparent and by the numbers it almost tripled in speed.

Threes a Crowd

Your hosting provider controls how many websites are shared with your website on your Webserver. Dedicated servers do not have any other hosts on them and they also tend to be muchmore expensive. For a typical hosting plan like GoDaddy, there can be many websites alongsideyour own site on a Web server; this can lead to a slowdown due to the sharing of resources.There is a tool available to check what websites share your server:http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/ . If you use this tool and runcolonialdrivingschool.com, you will see that this site is shared on a GoDaddy server with over1,000 other websites. If you run the same tool on VirginiaSEO.org, you’ll see that my site is on aserver with nine other websites. This means that I’m f ighting nine other websites f or myresources even though I have dedicated resources in my VPS. This would lead you to believe thatcolonialdrivingschool.com is going to perf orm slower due to the sharing of resources by thehosting provider.

Hosting Hardware

There are a couple of other f actors that af f ectyour hosting and most of these boil down tothe hardware that’s packed behind your hosting.Most hosting plans have an administrativedashboard, and if you log in, you can see whatsort of statistics your Web server is getting. Ifyou look at GoDaddy’s shared plan, you mightsee things like 512 Mb or RAM, or 500 Gbbandwidth. These are all f actors that af f ect thespeed of your website and the lowermeans slower. If you look at a virtual privateserver like mine, you might see specs like twogigs of RAM 5 Tb of bandwidth. Your hostingprovider might also use various types of hard drives. Some of these now of f ers solid-statedrives, which perf orm f aster. The location of your hosting provider also makes a dif f erence on itsspeed. If you’re hosting providers in China and you are accessing your website f rom America,things are going to be a litt le bit slower because every communication has to travel half wayaround the world. Another big item which controls the speed your website is the network cardsyour server has. Hosting providers of f er mega bit cards as def ault. This means that the speed of

data going into and out of your website is limited to 100 Mb per second. Most hosting providersare now of f ering gigabit cards. This is 10 times the pipe to transmit data into and out of yourwebsite. You can most likely get this with your current hosting provider, though they tend to be alitt le bit pricey.

Code

Now here comes the big one. The code of your website can greatly af f ect the speed of yourwebsite. If you have a well-designed slim coded website, it ’s going to perf orm f ast. If you have areally bulky, very graphic intensive, heavy on JavaScript website, it ’s going to perf orm slowly. Ifyou use a content management system, it is going to add overhead to your website versus usingplain HTML. This means that if your website runs on WordPress, Drupal or Joomla!, then you areusing a content management system and this is af f ecting your site speed. Now, these contentmanagement systems themselves do not greatly af f ect your site speed but what does af f ectyour site speed, in relationship to the systems, is the use of plug- ins and themes.

Themes

Themes tend to increase the code overhead of your website. When your theme designerdesigned the website typically they will create several stylesheets and link to them using variousmethods. These stylesheets load on every page and increase the overhead of your page. Alsoevery time an element is added to the page, it increases the overhead of the HTML. Furthermorewhen JavaScript is used to create animations or dynamically query inf ormation- this alsoincreases overhead. So if your website is using this really, really awesome theme that looks greatand it scrolls sideways and has sliding images and a f lashy graphics, this is probably af f ectingyour websites speed. There are many tools to test the speed of your website and give you a verynice report with actionable items that you can do to increase the speed of your website.

Remember to check out part 2: https://www.virginiaseo.org/blog/your-website- in- the-f ast- lane-speed-and-seo-part-2

Adys Lynn Dill

SEO Consultant at Virginia SEO

Adys Lynn Dillis a mother of one and really enjoys spending time with her f amily.Besides taking care of her husband (the other baby), she spends her t ime doinggraphic design as a part of the f amily business. The Dill Design is a local web design company inVirginia, and they specialize in small business websites. Lynn also participates heavily with VirginiaSEO, and is head of social media marketing, and a key member of the content generation team.Lynn enjoys social media so much that she is on it more than a normal person should be somedays.