Increase Site Speed with Help from Google Page Speed Insights

For the past 2 weeks i was working had to improve Linkstoweb loading time, and that’s why you don’t find any new post for 2 weeks. Yes it was a long 2 Weeks and there was lots of tweaking happening on our this blog[...].

To Know more about bug fixes and improvements that were made to Linkstoweb please visit our Change log Page.In this blog post I would like to share what I leaned about Improving Website or Blogs Speed. This are very simple steps, So let us start this with answering this Question

Why I Need to Care About site load speed?

On April 09, 2010, Google  incorporated site load speed into its ranking algorithm . Google made it mandatory for site owners and web authors to keep a close look at their site loading time because now search rankings will include site response time too in order to make searching more user friendly for internet users. Or just simply if you click on a link of a site and it is ideal that entire site should load within a few seconds, otherwise such visitors may move on to another site instead.

In-fact the first 3 seconds of a website are enough to let a visitor decide whether he may let the site to load fully or hit the close button and leave away.

So making Site load faster is very important, or you could loose traffic by welcoming visitors with dead slow web pages and as a result loose several valuable subscribers every day.

How can I make my blog or Website load more quickly?

There is a solution for every problem and for this there are many. there are some easy optimization methods that will help you speedup your blog like never before!

First of all you need to Analyze your Site’s Loading Time. Find out how quickly your site loads- There are many tools available for this but we recommend Google PageSpeed Insights. Because this tool is very easy to use ,also available as an open-source browser extension for Google Chrome and Firefox, and it gives you scores out of 100 according to your site performance. To use this tool

• Visit Check Speed Score
• Submit your Blog or Website  URL
• Note down your score
• If you scored anything above 80 then your blog needs a little more improvement. Any score below 80 means you need to take some serious steps to cut down the extra burden of scripts, images and server requests on your blog.

Now you can also Analyze the critical path of your web page with the new Critical Path Explorer. Which Helps you to Find time taken to load all Java script files(.js) and all CSS elements.

 

Critical Path Explorer Screen

Start Optimizing Speed

At a glance, we can see which areas of our Site require some tweaking in order to load more quickly:
One Page Speed analysis page you might have seen various suggestions categorized as high priority, low and medium. I am listing them below for reference:

• High priority
  Serve scaled images, Combine images into CSS sprites
• Medium priority
  Optimize images, Minimize redirects
• Low priority
  Minify (CSS, HTML, JavaScript), Optimize the order of styles and scripts,Enable compression, Avoid CSS @import

 

You will get detailed information's about each one by clicking on each area.

Image Optimization: I give lots of impotence when it comes to Optimizing Images in my blog, Because as you see it is one of the big factor effecting Blogs loading time. Here are some key points that i follow  ,

• first crop images and then upload them in original size. If your uploaded image is large in size and you are adjusting it to a small or medium size then you unnecessarily increased the page size in bytes.Windows Live Writer Helps me for that.
• specify width and height dimensions for every image that I upload.
• I often put all frequently used icons, buttons and images in just one big image.This prevents several sever requests and helps to load images fast by just calling a single image once.I use a tool called CSS Sprites Generator For this. CSS sprites reduces the number of round-trips and delays in downloading other resources and can reduce the total number of bytes downloaded by a web page.
• I use images only in gif or PNG formats. And can further compress and reduce the size of PNG images without loosing quality using tools like PNGOUT And Paint.net

• Since This blog is plowed by Blogger, I upload images on blogger server only. If all images are stored on a single server then the browser has to connect to just one server to download all images thus it saves redirects to several external image links.

JavaScript Optimization : The use of (or how we use) JavaScript (mostly external JavaScript) are one of the other main reason which slows down the blog. The problem is, how do you load an external JavaScript or .js files like Facebook like box,Twitter buttons, Disqus comments. with minimal impact on blog?
Here is points that i follow

• Minify JavaScript: "Minifying"  refers to eliminating unnecessary bytes, such as extra spaces, line breaks, and indentation.

       I use Tools like YUI Compressor, jscompress for this.

• Asynchronous download. The download of my script should not block the download of any script on their sites. I Have use this on Facebook Like and twitter button.
• I am also trying to Combine All JavaScript's, This is properly the best method to enhance a site performance. Instead of linking the jquery or JavaScript code for every plugin separately. you may paste all the scripts in one single file and save this file with the .js extension then call it in your blog template.
• Use Disqus .js load function in a way that Blog comments will only load whenever readers click on 'Add Your Comments' Button bellow the post. This has reduced waiting time for Disqus comments.

There is a detailed information about tools that i use in this blog on our Tools And Resources Page. Do check it out.
I have been using this tool and optimizing Linktoweb bit by bit. I will update you more on this great new Google service that has a lot of quality tools and tutorials to help you understand how page speed is controlled and optimized.

Did you know of this great tool by Google? What's your Site Speed score? Do not forget to share and discuss so that we struggle together.