Speeding up Websites, Part 1
As many are learning, Google has announced that one of the factors that will improve your SEO performance and, naturally, your user’s experience, is by speeding up your website. At GlobalSpex, we’ve always been cognizant of this but more for our customer’s and their target market rather than search engines. By using CSS, alt tags, image compression in our web design for speed, style, and 509 disability compliance, it seems this might be helpful for optimization as well. But, as always, we are always learning.
So, we are taking additional steps in improving our website’s speed as well as our customer’s. Google suggests installing their speed tool, Page Speed, to help diagnose and suggest ways to compress the site and speed it up. Below are the areas that Page Speed will review:
- Browser Caching – to help with the browser by instructing it to load previously downloaded resources (images, css, html, etc.) from your local disk rather than over the network.
- CSS compression – Removing CSS from documents, compression external CSS and removing unused.
- JavaScript compression – minimizing and combining javascript code.
- Images – Optimizing and setting dimensions.
So far I’ve compressed our website’s CSS file by removing spaces and extraneous styles. The next suggestion was installing in our .htaccess file with the recommended caching code. (My next post will include this code)
