| In April, 2010, Google announced that speed would be | | | | are: |
| a factor in ranking websites, and I don't mean the | | | | 1) Bloated and uncompressed images |
| speed at which people hit the back button, although | | | | 2) Lack of http compression |
| that affects your ranking, too. I mean the speed at | | | | 3) External files drawn from another site (yay, social |
| which your website loads. But don't be too quick to | | | | media feeds) |
| blame your webhost. | | | | 4) Excessive plugins |
| Server speed may be the issue if you have one of | | | | 5) Multiple style sheets |
| those $39 for the whole year hosting accounts on a | | | | If you're not sure how fast your site loads, hurry |
| server shared by thousands of sites. And it's probably | | | | straight over to tools.pingdom.com, type in your |
| not a bad idea to test your server speed and uptime. | | | | website URL and click the "Test Now" button. Then |
| Because if your webhost has uptime issues, when | | | | wait. When the screen loads, you'll see a long list of all |
| they're down for the count, you're out of business. | | | | the items that load on your site, along with the file size |
| But when it comes to loadtime for SEO purposes, | | | | for each. Then scroll to the bottom of the page to see |
| more often than not, the website itself is the problem. | | | | a whole list of all the files that need to load in order to |
| The average bear often doesn't realize how many | | | | display your site. |
| files have to load to display an entire website. | | | | Take a good look at the load time. If it's not 10 |
| How many images are you loading, including your | | | | seconds or less, you maybe want to fix that. Or ask |
| header and navigation graphics? Are your images | | | | me for a quote to speed up your site. Or learn how. |
| compressed or bloated? Do you also load scripts, | | | | Or what ever. But do something to fix it. |
| plugins, xml, rss feeds and external files? Are you | | | | While you're at it, you might want to go to the main |
| pulling in slow loading feeds from your social media | | | | page (pingdom.com) and use the free trial to test your |
| sites? How big is your HTML file itself? And is that all | | | | hostserver. Because a slow site on a slow server is |
| Greek? See, there is a use for SEO geeks like me. | | | | never going to get you on page one of Google. |
| The files most often responsible for slow loading time | | | | |