With time being one of the business world’s most precious commodities, it is important that websites load quickly and completely – or you risk losing the prospective customer. As search engines like Google continue to develop their ranking algorithms, evidence is emerging that loading time is now included in their scoring systems. Consequently, how fast your site loads will have an impact on your site’s position in the search results.

The easiest and quickest way to reduce your loading time is to limit the number of web elements on each page. Elements include items such as scripts, images and any Flash components. Each element requires an http marker within the page’s code, creating http requests to the server for each component. The more elements you have, the more requests and the slower the page will load.

Ask yourself – for every piece of your webpage – what value does it add to my site, to my SEO and to my customers? If the answer is low or none, then cut it.

This doesn’t mean images should be avoided completely, but if they are essential, make sure they are optimised. Images should not be written into your code as they stand, but should be saved as suitable for web, with a screen-only resolution of 72 dpi and in GIF or PNG format. It also makes sense to resize the images so they reflect the size on screen.

For more information and advice on how to optimise your website design for the search engines, and ensure it loads in the shortest possible time, contact NSDesign for a free no-obligation consultation.

Tags: loading time, search engines, site elements, Web Design, website design, website load time, website loading time

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 2:17 pm and is filed under SEO, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.