Did you know your page rank is also gauged by having a fast website? It is the truth. Check out what Matt Cutts says about website page load time… Google incorporating site speed in search rankings
I want to pre-debunk another misconception, which is that this change will somehow help “big sites” who can affect to pay more for hosting. In my experience, small sites can often react and respond faster than large companies to changes on the web. Often even a little bit of work can make big differences for site speed. So I think the average smaller web site can really benefit from this change, because a smaller website can often implement the best practices that speed up a site more easily than a larger organization that might move slower or be hindered by bureaucracy.
So with that information it is safe to say …the faster your website loads the more distance you put between other competing webmasters. Now this might not play a huge factor with rankings but where it does really help is attracting more visitors. A slow website often means people are limited on what type of connection they have. So in order to accommodate everyone it is essential to increase your site speed. That is a sound website strategy.
I just seamlessly transferred nichewebsitestrategy.com thanks to HostGator. We where once on a Windows Server and we switched to a Linux VPS server for scalability, performance and security. So if you noticed the huge increase in page load times for this website it is not your imagination. We also went through and hand optimized each file to better serve our visitors with on page optimization.
We performed a before and after benchmark which is very impressive and in some cases decreasing the page load time up to 3 seconds. The program we used was called WebWait. The key here is after you perform you benchmark go and get an extension to Firebug called page speed. This extension will not only help you identify problem areas but shows you exactly where those problem areas are and gives solutions to fix it. It’s a very powerful tool for serious Webmasters. I should note we will be covering each tool, how to use them and how to fix issues in the weeks to come so you can harness a fast website too.
With that check out what we came up with and tell me your thoughts on it…
This is Scot Manaher signing off!
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