Optimizing Cnizz.Com For Page Speed and SEO February 3, 2010
Posted by chris in : seo , trackbackThis is the first installment of my SEO category. I’ve dabbled in SEO here and there every since I ran a semi-successful (but not successful enough) music site through 2006-2008. The site actually ranked highly for a few good SERPs and received over 10,000 unique visits per month. Though the site is a shell of its former self I still run adsense on it which brings in about $20 a month. Sighh, what could have been. In any case, I feel I’m qualified to talk about SEO to the limited audience this blog attracts.
I was just reading over @ SEOmoz that in 2010 page speed may be considered when ranking SERPs. I downloaded the google page speed for firefox plugin and decided to see where my domain sucked. The results are in:
86 out 100 isn’t too bad, at least its better than what my grades looked like in high school. Lets see what kind of optimizations I can make based off of Googles suggestions.
Image Optimizations
When the plugin says “Specify image dimensions” it’s just telling you that instead of having html for an image that is 50 x 50 like this: img src=”myimage.png” to instead specify its dimensions like this: img src=”myimage.png” height=”50″ width=”50″. Google also says serving scaled images is a no-no. Google become a bit angry because one of my images was 100×100, but I was scaling it in the HTML to be 50×50. Just open up your image editor (I use da GIMP cause I’m on Linux) and scale it to the dimensions you want. After these few modifications I reanalyzed my page and the plugin had bumped up my score to 90 out of 100. Woot! Thats an “A-” grade.
The next image optimization listed was the actual optimization of image compressions. Luckily the plugin will give you the optimized version and tell you how much space it will save. Just expand the “Image Optimization” box, click on the image, save it, and upload it to your server. This moved cnizz.com up to 91 out of 100.
Remove unused CSS
A lot of designers put their CSS into single file. Google advises against this and told me I could reduce the size of my CSS file by 19% (510 bytes) by removing CSS that was not used on the index page. Then something strange happened. Creating a second CSS file and only including that on pages were those classes were used caused by score to go down to 88 (remember I was at 91). Google penalized me for having multiple CSS files! I threw my hands up in the air on that one, marked it as nit-picky, and reverted back to my original CSS structure.
Leverage browser caching
This is the big one. I expect most sites to suffer from this. Its easy to resolve through the use of an HTACCESS file. I threw in the following code:
<FilesMatch ".(flv|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|ico|swf|css)$"> Header set Cache-Control "max-age=3600" </FilesMatch>
This bumped me up to 94 out of 100. I could obtain 98 out of 100, by increasing the max-age to an insane amount of time. However on sites were the front page changes frequently such as a high volume e-commerce sites index page this is likely to be a bad idea. Just imagine if those thousands of users that just clicked through your adwords campaign were seeing last weeks special offers, yikes! However caching images that you know will not change unless there is a major site redesign is a good idea.
Conclusion
The google page speed plugin for firefox certainly gives you some great ideas for increasing the speed of your site and reducing the amount of bandwidth being pushed through your pipe. Lots of these suggestions can be implemented in a very short one day to one week project (depending on the size of your site). My advise is run the tool, but be cautious about the changes you make. Remember, you’re using this tool to potentially increase your listings for your targeted SERPs, but more importantly, this is a tool that should improve the experience of your sites users. As always there is balancing act between performance and features.
I welcome your comments
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