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Website Slowing You Down? 
By Scott Van Achte (c) 2008

In a world where more and more households are connected to the
internet, bandwidth is becoming an issue and brownouts have been
predicted to occur in the next few years. With the strain on the
infrastructure of the internet this makes having an efficient,
fast loading website all that much more important.

The bottom line for most site owners though, is not the
efficiency of the internet as a whole, but rather the financial
sustainability of their websites. While there are many ways to
make a site perform better in terms of converting visitors, one
of the simplest, and probably most important aspects is simply
to reduce the load time of your website.

If your site suffers from poor performance, you could be missing
out not only on sales and average visitor time on site, but also
search rankings. Below I will discuss some of the negative
impacts a slow loading site may experience, as well as a few
ways you can correct the issue. In some cases, correcting the
problem will cost you only some time, although it has the
potential to really pay off in the long run.

Negative Impacts of Long Load Times
If your site takes too long to load this can have a number of
negative effects including loss of sales, loss of rankings, and
increased pay per click cost. It can even increase your hosting
costs depending on the cause.

Loss of Sales
Let's pretend for a moment that search engines just didn't exist
and rankings didn't matter. People are impatient - if your site
takes too long to load, many potential customers will simply
give up and go elsewhere.

Broadband connections are growing incredibly fast in the US;
however, according to a study posted at FoxNews
(http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,375624,00.html) this past
July, approximately 10% of Americans still have dial-up internet
access. If your site loads slowly, you may be alienating 10% of
your potential customers.

The last thing you want to do is frustrate your visitors. If you
do this, you may drive them away, never to return. If you can
provide a fast loading efficient website, you will increase the
likelihood that your visitors will make a purchase, and return
again in the future.

Increased Pay per Click Costs
Only a few short months ago a post by Heather Lane at the Inside
AdWords blog (http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/06/
landing-page-load-time-now-affects.html) announced that landing
page load times will affect a keyword's quality score. The
reason for this is quite simple: a fast loading website improves
the end user experience. As a result, ads directing to a slow
loading page will be given a lower quality score. This in turn
will cause your keyword bids to be higher, costing you
significantly on a per click basis.

Loss of Organic Rankings
We know two things for a fact. Google factors in load times with
AdWords, and Google focuses on an improved end user experience.
As a result, I for one am convinced that a site's load time does
impact overall organic search rankings. While this is likely
only a small piece of the very large algorithmic puzzle, it does
play a part, and if you can speed up your site, you just may be
able to move your rankings up a notch or two.

Speeding up your site is unlikely to move your site from page 8
all the way to page 1, but it may be enough to move up a few
positions.

Increased Hosting Costs
Assuming your load times are due to file size issues and not
other server constraints, your hosting costs may be more than
they need to be. This factor will vary a great deal based on the
hosting company and the package you have chosen.

Many hosts now offer packages where a significant amount of
bandwidth usage is included, resulting in a single flat monthly
or annual rate. (LunarPages (http://news.stepforth.com/exit/
lunarpages.php) for example, has a $4.95 monthly plan with
unlimited bandwidth per month.) If your hosting provider does
put a limit on usage and you are using beyond the allocated max,
you could be paying a fair bit in overage charges. If you fall
into this category, optimizing your files to reduce bandwidth
usages could save you a considerable amount of cash.

Issues and Fixes
There are a number of issues that can cause a site to load
slowly. Below I have noted a few items that are fairly common
and can be relatively easily corrected.

Issue: Un-Optimized Images
This is probably one of the biggest culprits out there impacting
load time today. I have seen countless websites where image
optimization is simply not done, resulting in significantly
increased page load times. One of the biggest problems is when
images are scaled down to fit the application.

Quite often webmasters will take a large image, and scale it
down using the height and width attributes rather than
physically resizing the image. What this does is then require
the browser to load the full high resolution image, when it
really only needs a fraction.

Let's take this real world example. A client recently had a
photo on their home page; the photo was 600 x 403 pixels,
weighed in at 124.68 KB, and visually they had scaled the image
to fit 473 x 317 pixels.

By resizing the original image to the desired dimensions, and
then reducing the quality of the jpg to 70%, the end result was
an image that looked identical on his website but weighed in at
only 23 KB - that's 101.68 KB smaller than the original. Using a
simple filesize download calculator (http://www.onlineconversion.com/
downloadspeed.htm) I found online, 101.68 KB would take 14
seconds to download using a 56 Kb modem, or about 2 seconds on
your run of the mill broadband connection.

For broadband users 2 seconds may not seem like much, but
remember, this is only for a single image. When you add up all
other images and on-site components, the time can significantly
add up.

Issue: Un-Optimized files
Another way you can speed up your sites load time is to have
clean HTML, CSS, and other included files. Remove extraneous
code from your files, and use CSS wherever possible. Every piece
of old html code adds up in size, even if it doesn't impact the
visual site itself. I have seen many cases where links have been
removed but the code remains accidentally, leaving something
like:



This code, as tiny as it is, does contribute to an increase in
load time (and in this specific example, could also be seen as
spam by search engines).

If your site makes use of CSS, consider compressing it to save
on load times. You can do this by grouping identical styles to
save space. For instance,

    p {
    font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
    font-size:12px
    }

    li {
    font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
    font-size:12px
    }

can be compressed by grouping these two styles, reducing the
coding by half:

    p,li {
    font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
    font-size:12px
    }

Again this may not seem like much, but when you add this up with
all of the other little things, it can ultimately result in a
significantly increased load time for the page as a whole.

Audio and video can also be compressed. If your site uses a fair
bit of multimedia, see if you can compress these files a bit
more than you have already. You may be able to save some load
time here as well without impacting user experience.

Issue: Hosting Server
It is possible that your site is perfect in every way, but the
culprit is simply your web host. It does not necessarily mean
that your host is slow, but if you are paying for an account on
an old archaic computer with limited system resources servicing
1000 websites, this could seriously impact your site's load
time. If you have worked to ensure that the site is well
optimized for efficiency and the load times are still extreme,
you may need to upgrade your hosting account to one more suited
for your business needs.

If your site is a fairly basic, such as a static 8 page html
site, then a slow server may have little to no impact, but if
your site requires extensive database queries and the help of an
intensive content management system, and serves up tens of
thousands of visitors a day, then you may need to switch to a
higher end dedicated server. If you have found that your server
is the only problem in your slow load times, contact your host
to see what they can do for you.

Issue: HTTP Requests
According to a post at the Yahoo Developer Blog
(http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html), "80% of the
end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this
time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page:
images, style sheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number
of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests
required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages."

The article discusses combining files in order to reduce the
number of HTTP requests, largely by the use of CSS Sprites. They
also discuss using image maps to combine multiple images,
however, from an SEO perspective, this is not something that I
would recommend as my experience has shown image-mapped links
are not always followed by search engine spiders.

They go on to explain a vast number of rather technical aspects
to speeding up a page. If you are a technical person capable of
implementing advanced techniques, the Yahoo Developer Network
(http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html) is definitely
something you should check out.

Load Time Tools
Before you undergo any changes to your site to resolve the slow
load times, I suggest first finding a tool and benchmarking your
progress. Record how long your site takes to load, and then try
again after you have made an effort to correct the problem.

There are a number of tools out there that can help you
calculate your load times. One such tool is
WebSiteOptimization.com. This site specializes in optimizing the
performance of your site in order to decrease bandwidth and load
times. They have created a very simple tool which will give you
the load times for the individual components of your site, which
can give you a good idea where to start.

Summary
If you take a bit of time to speed up the load time for your
website by optimizing your existing content and cleaning up your
code, you may just find yourself making more sales. As an added
bonus you may also find improved search engine rankings, which
will then in turn increase your sales further. Depending on your
hosting provider, you may even have a reduced monthly hosting
bill. Decreasing the load time of your site is really win-win
for everyone.

As the internet becomes more and more bandwidth intensive with
an ever increasing stream of users and higher use applications,
doing whatever we can do reduce the strain on the system will
make for a faster internet for everyone. If every webpage on the
internet could be reduced by even just 100 kb, the web would be
a much faster place.
================================================================
Scott Van Achte is the Senior SEO at StepForth Web Marketing Inc.
based in Victoria, BC, Canada and founded in 1997. You can read
more of Scott's articles and those of the veteran StepForth team
at http://news.stepforth.com or contact us at
http://www.stepforth.com/ .
Tel - 250-385-1190, Toll Free - 877-385-5526, Fax - 250-385-1198
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