Improve WordPress Site Speed To Improve Web Search Ranking
On April 9 Google has officially announced that site speed is now part of the web search ranking algorithm. This wasn’t really a big surprise for anyone who was paying attention to what was happening. First Matt Cutts announced that Google is “considering” to start using Page Load Speed as one of the ranking factors during his November presentation at PubCon, then in December Google has added a nifty little tool to the Labs Section of Webmaster Tools – Site Performance.
I don’t know about you but when Google ads a tool that allows you to see how your blog is seen by others, better yet – how it performs compared to others – I pay close attention, as they don’t just do it out of whim. And it actually makes sense as faster sites (blogs) provide a better visitor experience and I have covered the topic in several of my older posts:
- WordPress Guide: Howto Force Your Blog Load Fast
- Turn WordPress Into Speed Demon
- How To Get More Traffic To Your Blog By Getting Rid Of Bloat
And a few more posts you can find by searching for “page load speed” but I leave that option to you! Instead I want to concentrate on what is happening now and how your WordPress blog Page Rank is impacted by site speed.
But before we move into discussion of our options – we need to understand what exactly is measured and how it is ranked in overall picture, basically – should you even worry about it?
Speed Matters!
I think it goes without a saying that people browsing the web have a short attention span and I personally don’t wait too long for a page to load, so optimizing your pages to improve retention is an obvious reason. But lo and behold! Google actually conducted studies and provided results of their experiments to see just HOW EXACTLY page load speed impacts web-based business. Read it in their Speed Matters blog post.
According to information I dug up on the subject Google uses 2 different ways to measure page load speed (quote below):
- How a page responds to Googlebot
- Load time as measured by the Google Toolbar
And if you paid attention – your Google webmaster tools have provided you with measures on how your blog performs since last December, here are my blog stats:
Not too good, as far as I’m concerned and I already have some ideas on how to greatly improve it but first – we need to talk in a bit more details on…
Tools To Measure Your WordPress Blog Page Load Speed
Before any optimization takes place you need to know what you are dealing with, establish baseline and understand WHAT on your blog creates problems. There are a few tools I use and like to share with you.
1. Google Site Performance Tool
While it doesn’t give you too many options – it can be of GREAT help for getting started and basic performance issues optimizations. In fact – problems identified by this tool will be very closely aligned to a more advanced and complete tools I will share later.
Above you can see an examples of the few pages and Load Time as Google sees it. But it gets even better as Google will actually shows you some of the most critical things you can do to OPTIMIZE Page Load Speed for same pages, shown below:
Some of the things are under your control and some – kind off, as doing optimization will actually impact functionality and you just have to decide if you can deal with it or optimize it. Let’s just go over things shown below and what can be done to address them:
- Enable gzip compression – this is actually done on server-side and nothing you can do about it if your host doesn’t support it, sometimes they can enable it per cPanel account, so might be worth to ask. In my case – I’ll be recompiling my VPS Apache to enable this support this weekend.
- Combine external JavaScript – unfortunately those scripts are used by different plugins / widgets and the only way you can do optimization is to remove some of the functions. In my case I have chosen to remove Facebook widget to remove the script but second one comes from Lijit plugin and I’ll be keeping it.
- Minimize DNS lookups – once again, the only way to minimize those is cut functionality, although as shown above I was able to reduce it by moving banner for EWP and making it local and removing Facebook widget. That saved me 2 DNS queries out of 4.
- Serve resources from a consistent URL – the only way I found to optimize this one is by removing functionality through uninstalling plugins and it is not something most of bloggers would do, unless plugin is really useless – but then why do you have it in first place?
Those are just a few of the samples for very basic and there are a LOT better tools to use and see what exactly creates a speed bottleneck on your blog.
This is an Add On for Firefox / Firebug and absolutely FREE. Link I provided contains tutorials on How to install and use it on right hand side – be sure to read it! Great explanations that I have no intent to re-write!
Expanding options shown by this add-on will show you what could be done to optimize the page. Once again you will discover that some of the things can be done by you but most involve choosing speed over functionality!
Decision only you can make!
And if the above wasn’t enough – I want to share a third tool, extremely useful to measure you site performance and probably one that provides more info than anything else and also web-based, so you don’t have to install anything!
This one gives you multitude of information and might be slightly overwhelming but since it has a graphical presentation of results – fairly easy to comprehend. Here is an example of my score:
Sad results and I’m still in disbelief about the times shown, so I would appreciate your input if you actually get as slow performance as they display!
Using anyone of the 3 tools provided above all together or individually should help you understand what is the biggest offender on your blog that slows it down and perhaps take steps to optimize the performance or even remove the offending plugin!
Optimize WordPress Site Speed
As I was working through multiple options for WordPress page load speed optimization I realized that there is only so much YOU, as an end-user can do. Bulk of the work will have to be shouldered by developers to help US rank better.
As I have shown above majority of optimization is done by basically removing the plugin or widget that creates all the extra DNS queries, loading external javascript, uses unoptimized images, utilizes not fully optimized code and css.
As an end users we just have to figure out which developers are actually paying attention to importance of optimization and encourage them by using their themes and plugins. Yes, theme optimization now becomes critical as a lot of code loaded through the theme that generates the look and feel of your blog, so be careful what you choose!
But not all is lost! I’m already seeing how some developers dive right in and looks like we will have some help very soon!
Donncha O Caoimh already announced beta version of the WP-Super-Cache plugin that will actually pre-fetch and create a cached version of your blog posts so when Googlebot visits it – it gets better speed and as result, help you ranking!
And if you are using a very popular Tweetmeme plugin on your WordPress blog you can optimize its functionality to make sure it doesn’t impact your page load speed following great tutorial by SEO mofo.
And if you are not comfortable with digging into code – perhaps you should just wait!
WordPress developers and supporters is one of the most resilient communities and I’m sure we will see response to the Google change soon in form of optimization. And if not – I want to mention one last thing you have to absolutely know about before taking any major steps such as removing plugins or changing theme
Page Load Speed is just ONE of the 200+ factors Google uses to rank your site and according to official announcement – it counts for less than 1% to make sure that PAGE RELEVANCY still takes priority!
So perhaps you should work on optimizing your WordPress – just don’t take any drastic measures! No need to panic my friend!
Related articles on Google Site Speed Page Ranking:
- Google: Site Speed Live as a Ranking Factor (marketingpilgrim.com)
- Google confirm that the speed of our website influences search engine ranking algorithms (krishnade.com)
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18 Responses to “Improve WordPress Site Speed To Improve Web Search Ranking”
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Excellent article! Very useful
Greetings from Portugal!
Luís´s last blog ..Motorola Z10 compacto e barato
Great post as always, Alex! How ironic that Google is now factoring in page load times, as the Net moves to video, usually the slowest-loading part of any site or blog. Does this mean old static pages now have an edge over scripted pages like blogs?
Doug Champigny´s last blog ..A Quick & Easy Boost For Your Affiliate Marketing Commissions?
Yeah, I had same question Doug
but from what I read – relevancy is still take precedence and as you know Google loves video 
So I wouldn’t discard video posts.
Hi Spotter
Just what I needed and presented in an easy to understand format.
Plus you gave me hope at the end “it counts for less than 1 percent.”
Gzip compression and wp-super-cache plugin looks like the way to go.
Appreciate your hard work putting this post together.
Keith Davis´s last blog ..Flying in formation
Keith,
Yeah, in my case gzip compression is a must and I’ll be working on it this weekend, time permitting
Alex
Very detailed post on speed. I read that Google announced page speed was going to be a factor in their aglorithm. The problem that I’ve struggled with is that, even though I’m using page caching, I’m on a shared host with limited resources. I’m looking into moving to a VPS so I can increase page load speed with more server resources.
Just saved me a lot of time Alex. Have had a note on the white board to spend some time researching page load speed because I too pay attention to new additions in Webmaster Tools.
Mike Paetzold´s last blog ..Custom Blog Themes made easily
Hello!
I really appreciate your hard work.
The article is very informative.
We have to review our sites.
Also, I know view websites.
They are very slow, but on first google page by some keywords.
Thanks to your article, I took a look in the matter and I was wondered google reports 77% of other sites load quicker than mine. Google offers some ideas for improvement: gzip and a few double images. Now, after applying those improvements, I’m curious what the results will be. Much depends – in the graph – of the time in the day/month though.
I don’t notice long load speeds on your site. Those long load speeds must include some items that aren’t visible to the user.
Thanks for the code from SEO mofo! That’s pretty intense but I’m going to implement it tonight. A little bit of work to permanently increase the load speed of my site sounds good to me.
I was also considering removing my Facebook “share/like” button but may look at trying an implementation like SEO mofo uses for the tweetmeme button. I’ll let you know if I get that one figured out.
Jared Detroit´s last blog ..What is the Purpose of Your Website?
Thanks Jared,
I found that removing everything is not necessary an option. Also I considered doing same as you are planning, problem is – I’m always short on time lately and next time plugins upgraded – it will all have to be re-worked. With speed being just a small factor I found that taking some other steps, such as using gzip on my host is more beneficial to me, considering time for benefits return
Hi Spotter
I actually didn’t think the page load speed was a big deal, I found out about it earlier through a forum, but I reasoned that it shouldn’t be a big impact on rankings as Google’s philosophy is towards the relavancy of the content of the website to the keyword use in the search box.
After reading your post it changed my mind, not entirely, but I can see how a faster blog can help out with rankings. And whatever it takes to get higher rankings, even this, I will try to integrate on my own sites.
Thanks
W3 Total Cache has done a great job of making things move a whole lot faster on my blog and Googlebot seems to be happy with that as it’s reporting 8 secs in Webmasters Tool
Udegbunam Chukwudi´s last blog ..Make Your Blog 10x Faster With W3 Total Cache Plug-in
Gmetrix (http://gtmetrix.com/) offers an easy way of checking your YSlow and PageSpeed score without installing their firefox addons. Check it out. Loves it! You can even compare your site’s speed with that of others too.
I never knew site speed made such a difference. Thanks for the advice. I am not too computer savvy but I will try and implement some of the ideas you’ve suggest.
Hans Georg´s last blog ..Pranayama – Standing Deep Breathing Exercise
An update to my comments a couple of months ago. I’ve implemented W3 Total Cache for WordPress including MaxCDN Content Delivery Network, which works with the cache plugin. I’ve found it more robust than the super cache plugin and it works with the CDN, which is great. Load times have decreased significantly and while I had to spend awhile configuring and testing everything, it’s now running faster.
I recommend checking it out.
Jared Detroit´s last blog ..Facebook Fan Pages for Business
Thanks Jared,
I did. Problem is – I switched my server to nginx and that server is currently not officially supported. My attempt to implement it right now didn’t give me desired benefits, super-cache+autoptimize actually outperformed it. With number of rules that has to be created for proper rewrites more then likely I simply missed a thing or two. According to the W3 Total Cache author, Frederick, v1 of plugin will provide native support for nginx, perhaps I will try it then