Creating a fast loading website is not only important for your visitors browsing pleasures but search engines are beginning to focus in on this aspect as part of the algorithms.
At FIJ Design we develop each SEO clients website to meet the latest Page Speed standards and best practices as outlined by the search engines themselves. For your information listed below is 34 of the main areas we concentrate on as part of our search engine optimisation service to increase Page Speed Performance.
- Enable compression (gzip, deflate)
- Leverage browser caching
- Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Specify image dimensions
- Minify HTML
- Minify JavaScript
- Minify CSS
- Inline Small JavaScript
- Inline Small CSS
- Avoid CSS @import
- Defer parsing of JavaScript
- Combine images into CSS sprites
- Specify a character set
- Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding header
- Avoid bad requests
- Enable Keep-Alive
- Make landing page redirects cacheable
- Minimize redirects
- Minimize request size
- Optimize images
- Optimize the order of styles and scripts
- Prefer asynchronous resources
- Put CSS in the document head
- Remove query strings from static resources
- Serve resources from a consistent URL
- Serve scaled images
- Specify a cache validator
- Defer loading of JavaScript
- Remove unused CSS
- Use efficient CSS selectors
- Remove any duplicate scripts
- Minimise the amount of DOM element usage
- Minimise the amount of iframe usage
- Use cookie free domain (sub domain) for static content
Both Google and Yahoo are keen to encourage fast loading websites and each has their own article available which we advise reading if you’re new to Page Speed and load time performance.
Google Article: Web Performance Best Practices
Yahoo Article: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site
