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 the following tips:
Make Firebug and Yahoo’s YSlow your best friends
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.
To make things even better, Yahoo h