Speed is of the essence, or so the saying goes. Despite the fact that broadband is close to becoming a universal standard amongst computer users, your website’s load time plays a vital role in conversions and usability.
Matt Cutts, Google’s Anti-Spam Czar, had this to say about loading times:
As long as Google can load your web pages, it doesn’t really make a different whether the pages load in half a second or 5 seconds.
Ok, so it’s not a ringing endorsement in the quest for ever better SERPs, but the fact is that a slow site will kill your conversions faster than almost anything other than a broken page.
To aid you in your quest to get your site as optimized as possible, consider analyzing your page’s speed and performance so that you know exactly how/why your page loads are slow, and more importantly, to know where your problem areas are so that you can fix them.
Analyze your site’s performance using Firebug and YSlow
If ever there were a specific reason to use Firefox as your primary browser for optimizing your site, this is it. Firebug is a browser extension that will considerably make debugging your website a much more enjoyable experience.
With Firebug, you get a microscopic view of all of the complex mechanisms that make up your website. View the Document Object Model (DOM), edit CSS on the fly, look at what header information is being sent, and through the NET panel, you can see exactly how your pages are loading and how fast.
Note that there is a missing javascript file that is serving a 400 Server Error page for one of the javascripts. A missing file can really hamper your page, as often the server will sit and wait for the file, sometimes even timing out before moving on to the next part of the page.
Things like missing components on your page are a vital thing for you to fix ASAP, but fortunately, are usually a simple fix.
Why is my site slow?
To make things even better for us, Yahoo! has released an extension for Firebug called YSlow to answer just that: Why is my site slow?
Let’s see why this wordpress write panel took 32 seconds to download:
Well there we go. Our wordpress has taken it upon itself to load us down with 185k of javascript, spread out amongst 26 different files. No wonder the admin panel is so slow!
YSlow will rate your page according to Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site guidelines. (In fact, you should probably stop reading this and head straight to that site, because the wisdom imparted from Yahoo’s experts is invaluable…)
Conclusion
A few simple changes along the lines of those recommended by Yahoo! can make a vast improvement to the speed, real or perceived, of your site. That in turn will increase your conversion and retention rates of your pages immensely.
Using the free Firebug and YSlow tools available to you as Firefox extensions can help put you and your website ahead of the game by helping you know where your problem areas are and giving you the hints you need to improve the overall speed of your site and help put you ahead of the competition.
