Website Design and the Need for Speed

I truly does not matter how great or informative a website is and it would not serve any purpose if it does not have visitors. And while people who log onto websites directly do account for a considerable number, the fact remains that most website traffic to websites is generated through search engine queries. This is basically why any webmaster would want his/her website to feature highly on search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.

While search pay a great deal of attention to  relevance and website content to rank its sites, a new aspect that Google has now started taking into account is the time that a website takes to load. So yes, if your website takes forever to load, you can be sure that it would have an adverse effect on your website score created through the Google algorithm.

While this new aspect will not affect the ranking of a website significantly, Google says that you can be sure that it would have an effect, however minimal it might be.  Moreover, with competition in the SEO world getting more and more intense with each passing day, even the slightest of leverage over competitors is sought.

The good thing is that you can use various formatting tips and tools to try and make your website faster.

Formatting:
•    You can start by using external scripts especially if you run the same script through multiple pages. This does not refer to external hosting, but to loading the script from a single source as opposed to incorporating it within each page. This would put the script in the cache and would thereby cut down the loading time.  
•    If your website takes particularly long to load and is multimedia intensive, then you might want to think about making modifications wherein you could remove/delete any of the heavy files that aren’t necessarily required.
•    Using CSS in case you wish to use tables would also help. Try and minimize the use of nesting tables because it does take a longer time for browsers to read the html entirely and then come to the layout.
•    Also try to refrain using ‘full page’ tables as nothing would display on the page until the whole table is read. While this will not really make the page load faster, the user/viewer would feel it does because some components of the page start to appear before the more heavy ones.
•    If your website has extremely long or heavy pages, you might also want to think about dividing them further in order to make them lighter.

Tools:
Various freely available tools can be used to augment website speed. These tools would help analyze your existing website, while also making worthwhile suggestions to make your website faster. Some of the more popular tools that can help you with this aspect include:
•    Yahoo! YSlow
•    Google Webmaster Tools - Site Performance
•    Page Speed
•    WebPageTest
•    Webmaster Tool
•    Web Page Analyzer

Also remember that while the page loading time does not have a monumental effect on your website’s page rank (as yet), longer loading times can often leave a user/viewer dissatisfied, and therefore have him/her looking for other options. So when it comes to website design, paying attention to speed is absolutely essential.