SEO Tips: How Quick Is Your Page Speed

The speed that your page loads will help you with a lot of things including your bounce rate (more people will click straight off your blog without reading anything if it takes too long to load) and it will help your interaction and page views. People are more likely to look through multiple pages on your site if they appear quickly.

You can do a quick page speed test right here http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ it will give you a quick overview of how quick your page loads for an outsider.

If your page seems to load a little slow here are some things to check

• What size are you uploading images in? You know when you upload a photo to your blog and it takes minutes to add on before you can insert it, if it takes that long then it will do the same when someone comes to your blog. I used to upload images directly from my SLR camera and the files were huge so they’d take ages to load. You can easily decrease their size without reducing the quality (just ensure they’re at least 600 px wide) and then not only will they load to the back end of your blog quickly but they’ll load on the front end quickly.
• How much do you have in your sidebars? Sites which have numerous widgets/ images etc in their sidebars are likely to take longer to load because simply there’s more for a computer to have to place on your site before its complete. Think about whether you really need ALL of the things in your sidebar, if you do perhaps think about creating one image which includes multiple smaller images because one image loading takes much less time than four individual images.
• If you’re on WordPress have you got a load of Plugins downloaded which you don’t really use? Delete anything you don’t need to speed up your site.

There are a lot more technical things you can do to improve your page speed but unless you’re a designer/ coder they might be a little outside of reach (at work a lot of the time I have to pass these things on to the rest of my team).

Improving any of these things can really help your blogs page speed, and the difference of a fraction of a second can make a difference in Google’s eyes.