High page load time = Bad SEO
In “How the page load time of your blog or website impacts SEO”, we saw that a high page load time frustrates your users.
This results in bad user experience, which ultimately leads to lower ranking on the SERPs.
What increases the page load time?
There can be many culprits that contribute to a high page load time.
You can improve on most of the factors and thus, can improve the page load time. However, there isn’t much you can do for certain other factors.
Let’s have a look at the things that affect your page load time.
Reduce Page Load Time For SEO
Images on the webpage or post
Images are the biggest culprits in increasing the load time of your web pages. Both the size and number of images matter.
(Image source)
Here are a few tips as far as images go:
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Try not to have too many images in a post: 1 or 2 are just fine, unless you write about photography!
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Try not to have very large images in your posts: Larger the size of the image, the larger would be the file size. And the longer it would take to load.
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Actually resize the image, not just through HTML attributes: If you find a large image (say 1200 * 800), and want to display it only as a small image (say 500 * 333), don’t just use the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes of the IMG tag to reduce the display size. Reduce the image dimensions physically using an image editing tool, as that would reduce the size of the image (and therefore reduce the loading time).
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Optimize the image for web usage: Use only properly optimized images, as they are smaller in size. At the least, try to reduce the color depth as long as it doesn’t impact the way the image looks.
External scripts
Many of us put lots of scripts on our blogs or websites. These can be visitor tracking scripts (Google analytics, Sitemeter, etc), advertising scripts (Google AdSense, Chitika, etc), or some other scripts.
Of course, these scripts serve a purpose. However, refrain from having too many of them. These scripts call some function on another server, and are therefore inherently time consuming.
The higher the number of such scripts on your blog, the longer it would take to load. So, limit the number of scripts on your blog to reduce the load time.
Badges and Widgets
Various badges and widgets also call some remote server, and therefore reduce the page load time.
Is it necessary to show a badge of ALL the networks that you participate in? Is it not enough to show just a few? Similarly, is it necessary to have a lot of widgets on your blog?
Various badges and widgets not only increase the page load time, but also distract your readers from the content. This impacts the user experience negatively. (Remember, good user experience means good SEO).
Therefore, try to have only a limited number of badges and widgets on your blog or website.
Flash and Multimedia files
Flash and multimedia files (like video and audio files) are large in size, and naturally take a long time loading.
Again, reduce the number of these files in order to improve your page load time.
HTML Size
People use different softwares to create HTML files. Most software work just fine, but some (like Microsoft Word) create HTML files that are HUGE!!
Try to avoid creating HTML files using such software, or use some tool or utility to trim the HTML code created by such a software.
This would reduce the file size, and improve the loading time of the web page.
Server Load
Another reason for a high page load time can be the load on your server – if the server is getting too many requests to service, it would slow down considerably. This happens mostly on blogs and websites using a shared server.
There is not much you can do in this case – you can either shift to a better hosting provider, or can upgrade to a dedicated server that hosts only your blog or website.
Conclusion
Follow these tips, and the load time of your web pages would improve drastically. This would improve the user experience on your blog, and would therefore result in better SEO.
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