Website Speed!!!

[dmiller90]

I posted a few months ago, about my thoughts on Website rankings, based on Speed!! and posted numerous times about making sure your webmaster or whoever builds your site understands how to use proper coding for faster loading times.

Of course the Kool -Aid Crowd, tried to argue the points and say it did not matter, and that having old code and tables was fine, Your choice, AXE or Chainsaw

Well Guess What, WRONG--- Welcome to Google Caffeine.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

I just reviewed a site being built as we speak, from a so called Webmaster, still using code on every page for headers and footers. Trust me that is not correct and not giving this individual the best site for their money.

Why on earth this so called webmaster uses modern PHP files, but uses tables?? Not even close to being remotely correct. Wasted Code, on every page, Slower Loading Times, NO THANKS


<div id="head-xxx">
<table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellpacing="0" border="0">
<tr>
<td><a href="xxxxxxxx.php">Auto<br /><span class="nav_sm">Insurance</span></a></td>
<td><a href="xxxxxxxx.php">Home<br /><span class="nav_sm">Insurance</span></a></td>
<td><a href="xxxxxxxx.php">Business<br /><span class="nav_sm">Insurance</span></a></td>
<td><a href="xxxxxxxxx.php">Health<br /><span class="nav_sm">Insurance</span></a></td>
<td><a href="xxxxxxxxx.php">Life<br /><span class="nav_sm">Insurance</span></a></td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>

This will cause this site to have problems with this New Main Ranking factor. The problem is, most of you wont know this and will cause you problems in the future.

Special thanks to the clueless webmaster that you paid good money to.

Before you get sucked in by the "Sales Pitch" talk to someone that can advise you, if the sites are to Standard!!! if you dont, then you have no one to blame but yourself.

 

[Aaron_4SIGHT]

This is good stuff Dave. The Google Page Speed extension discussed in the link above is a great resource for optimizing your site's downloads.

FYI to AgentMethods customers: we're going through our infrastructure with the Speed Test extension to make sure your sites are optimized. Our servers are already fast and our sites are w3c standards compliant, but we're always working hard to find ways to make things faster.

 

[beatuplunchbox]

Dave, just noticed this on one of my domains. I switched out an older template that loaded slow (I use templates, just know enough coding to get by,) to a new clean cut template that loads really fast. I noticed that in about a week that my site moved up in the SERPs for several keywords that I was targeting.

It had to be that switch because I have not added any backlinks to this site in 6 months. I guess Google is serious about end user experience.

 

[JayVanDamme]

Hey Guys,

I'm sorry, in advance, if this is posted to the wrong place. I'm a newbie here, but it's a bit of an advanced website development question...

This question is in reference to Google's pagespeed tool, (which has been a huge help for me)...

I was just wondering if anyone out there knows a quick and simple way to "enable gzip compression" on their site. I've tried a few different things in my .htaccess file, but I can't seem to get it to work.

Pagespeed is suggesting I figure it out...

Any thoughts?

P.S. Great forum...lot's of great ideas and resources...thanks!

 

[CHUMPS FROM OXFORD]

Dave? Val? Austin? Others?

I don't have a clue what he is asking. If I had to guess, I would check the crankshaft but that's probably not right.

 

[djs]

Definitely not the crankshaft. Just needs air in the tires, lowers the rolling resistance, speeds everything up. Better gas mileage too....

Dan

 

[valdet]

Your host should be able to do that for you quite easily, but is your site made of dynamic PHP pages or you got static HTML content?

Once I know that I could help you..

 

[JayVanDamme]

Thanks for the reply Valdet...

I don't have any problem with my PHP sites...(I was able to go into PHP.ini to set them up) it's my static HTML ones that I can't get any gzip compression for...

If there's other info that might help you direct me I'd be happy to supply it...

Really appreciate any direction you might be able to provide!

BTW, I already replaced the crankshaft, so I don't think that's the problem...

Thanks!

 

[JayVanDamme]

I was able to solve this one myself...For anyone who is interested, I'll show you what I did...Although I wouldn't recommend doing messing around with this kind of stuff if you're not sure what you're doing...

here's what I added to the .htaccess file to make it work:

# compress the files
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/x-javascript
# removes some bugs
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
Header append Vary User-Agent

You were right, Valdet, about working with the host...

Thanks!

 

[valdet]

Oh sorry for not replying you earlier. I completely forgot to check this thread and follow on your reply.

I am glad you figured it out.

Ok then, since you're using PageSpeed, here's a little attachment for you. I would definitely suggest you to add the following commands to your htaccess to further improve your pagespeed score.
This sets expire and cache control headers to all of your site images and few other types of files.

I hope you and others find this useful.

Website speed is not the most important thing to look after on your websites and not too critical factor in ranking your site in search engines, but it's worth following Google guidelines.

Val.