Google’s need for speed
Being a avid observer of the results displayed in Google webmaster tools experimental labs feature, site performance, I was mortified to find that on average, pages in my site took anywhere from 10 to 15 seconds to fully load and not the few seconds that I am accustomed to.
In an attempt to find out the reason for the discrepancy between my timings and Google’s I searched for an answer and a solution to my dilemma.
How does Google establish your site’s performance?
According to Google, “Page load time is the total time from the moment the user clicks on a link to your page until the time the entire page is loaded and displayed in a browser. It is collected directly from users who have installed the Google Toolbar and have enabled the optional PageRank feature” and “a specific user may experience your site faster or slower than the average depending on their location and network conditions.”
How did I go about improving my site’s page speed?
As recommended by Google I downloaded Page Speed 1.7 – a Firefox/Firebug Add-on, Firebug 1.5.4 and Yahoo’s YSlow 2.0.7. All evaluate website performance and give suggestions after analysis on how to improve your site without the need to dig into your pocket. Yes, that’s right, they’re all free!
Having a Google Blogger Blog I was restricted to what I could do, but I did find by doing a few simple tasks as suggested by the three sites that my page speed improved dramatically.
What did I do?
Serve Scaled Images: Images resized in HTML (hypertext markup language) are being replaced with images of the exact size that I want.
Specify Image dimensions: I now specify a width and height for images in my HTML. Why? “A web browser can begin to render a page even before images are downloaded, provided that it knows the dimensions to wrap non-replaceable elements around. Specifying these dimensions can speed up page loading and improve the user experience.”
Optimize images: The larger the image size the longer your site takes to load. Images that I considered too large were lowered in size.
Minimize DNS Lookups: By replacing such things as Blog Directory, Facebook and Twitter based images with ones of my own I sped up my page loading. I also moved my Portable Network Graphics (PNG) images that were hosted at other sites to Google Picasa to do the same thing.
Minimize redirects: Any widget that was playing havoc with my blog especially the one that occasionally removed my posts and right sidebar and failed to load in a satisfactory fashion were removed.
Auto Pagination on Blogger: Taking into account Google’s need for speed I set my blog to show only one (1) post per page for faster page loading.
What happened after all this work?
As reported in Google Webmaster tools, my page speed has come down from the usual 15 to 10 seconds to 4.3 seconds!
In an attempt to find out the reason for the discrepancy between my timings and Google’s I searched for an answer and a solution to my dilemma.
How does Google establish your site’s performance?
According to Google, “Page load time is the total time from the moment the user clicks on a link to your page until the time the entire page is loaded and displayed in a browser. It is collected directly from users who have installed the Google Toolbar and have enabled the optional PageRank feature” and “a specific user may experience your site faster or slower than the average depending on their location and network conditions.”
How did I go about improving my site’s page speed?
As recommended by Google I downloaded Page Speed 1.7 – a Firefox/Firebug Add-on, Firebug 1.5.4 and Yahoo’s YSlow 2.0.7. All evaluate website performance and give suggestions after analysis on how to improve your site without the need to dig into your pocket. Yes, that’s right, they’re all free!
Having a Google Blogger Blog I was restricted to what I could do, but I did find by doing a few simple tasks as suggested by the three sites that my page speed improved dramatically.
What did I do?
Serve Scaled Images: Images resized in HTML (hypertext markup language) are being replaced with images of the exact size that I want.
Specify Image dimensions: I now specify a width and height for images in my HTML. Why? “A web browser can begin to render a page even before images are downloaded, provided that it knows the dimensions to wrap non-replaceable elements around. Specifying these dimensions can speed up page loading and improve the user experience.”
Optimize images: The larger the image size the longer your site takes to load. Images that I considered too large were lowered in size.
Minimize DNS Lookups: By replacing such things as Blog Directory, Facebook and Twitter based images with ones of my own I sped up my page loading. I also moved my Portable Network Graphics (PNG) images that were hosted at other sites to Google Picasa to do the same thing.
Minimize redirects: Any widget that was playing havoc with my blog especially the one that occasionally removed my posts and right sidebar and failed to load in a satisfactory fashion were removed.
Auto Pagination on Blogger: Taking into account Google’s need for speed I set my blog to show only one (1) post per page for faster page loading.
What happened after all this work?
As reported in Google Webmaster tools, my page speed has come down from the usual 15 to 10 seconds to 4.3 seconds!
Google's Webmaster site performance graph for St Vincent's Hospital Darlinghurst - Male Nurses - Blog
As for Pagespeed 1.7 it reported a score of 87/100 with a net speed of 3.31 seconds. YSlow, that was set for small site or blog, giving me a grade B for my efforts.
I encourage my fellow bloggers to take advantage of the services of Google Webmaster tools, Pagespeed, Firebug and YSlow, as it will surely make a huge difference to your site. If you do, please let me know how you get on.
As for me, anything that can help me in finding my St Vincent’s Hospital Darlinghurst classmates is well worth the effort.
To be continued…
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I encourage my fellow bloggers to take advantage of the services of Google Webmaster tools, Pagespeed, Firebug and YSlow, as it will surely make a huge difference to your site. If you do, please let me know how you get on.
As for me, anything that can help me in finding my St Vincent’s Hospital Darlinghurst classmates is well worth the effort.
To be continued…
