How to Speed Up Your Website: Search Engine Optimization with a Content Delivery Network and Pingdom

In April 2010, Google introduced a new signal into their search ranking algorithms utilized website speed. What that essentially means to web masters is that the speed of our websites is an indicating factor as to whether our website is a high quality place for users. Nobody likes sitting on a loading screen for several seconds; we want things to be instant.

In this hub, I'll explore what Google considers "fast," how Google measures website speed, where you can find your site's speed (both from Google and using 3rd party tools), and the best way to make your website faster.

Google considers any website that loads all content under 1.5 seconds fast. As you can see from the chart to the right, I struggled and still work very hard to maintain one of my websites in the green, or fast, portion of the chart.

This means that if you want to get the most Search Engine Optimization benefits from the Site Performance signal, then you need to get and ensure that your website loads (consistently) faster than 1.5 seconds.

Google measures Site Performance thanks to the users of their Google Toolbar who also enable optional Page Rank feature. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of all web users have the Google Toolbar installed, and even fewer have the Page Rank feature enabled. In order for Google to get any meaningful data, they need a lot of data. If your website doesn't get very much traffic, it's very likely that your website may not have a graph to display. Don't worry though, there are other ways to test your website's performance!

Google Webmaster Tools

Inside of Google Webmaster Tools under Labs > Site Performance you may or may not find this chart listed for your website. If you don't see it, that simply means that Google doesn't have enough speed data about your website to generate a chart. Luckily, there are 3rd party alternatives to test your website's performance whenever you'd like.

Pingdom

Pingdom is the best place on the Internet to test your website's performance. Simply enter your URL, wait a few seconds while their servers test the load time of your websites content, and the analyze the results. Here are a few screenshots so you know what to expect.

The top graph is a visual of the load order of the content on the page. Google.com requires only 3 files: the html index, the logo, and another small image. The bottom chart is a summary of the page and the required assets. The total page, including country redirects, required only 0.4 seconds to load!

Just for comparison: When I test cnn.com, the page takes 8.7 seconds to load and requires over 1.4 MB of files to be downloaded! Go ahead and test your website. Notice how CSS, Javascript, and images all take far too long to load. How can we make that stuff load faster?

Content Delivery Networks, or CDNs, are a special class of highly optimized servers spread out all around the world strategically to make content load faster. I know what you're thinking: Sounds expensive! In fact, the most popular CDN provider is very expensive: Akaimai. However, many other companies provide the same, or better, service for just a few cents per Gigabyte of bandwidth. Since most websites get very little traffic, almost always less than 100GB per month, paying for higher quality bandwidth from a CDN provider is actually well worth it.

Voxel

Voxel is the CDN provider I use for my website. They offer the most frictionless path of entry into the CDN market, with no up front costs, and you pay only for what you use. Their rate is very attractive too, at just 10 cents ($0.10 USD) per GB of data. As I mentioned, most websites use less than a fraction of 100GB of bandwidth per month, so even if you're the exception, and use say 100GB of bandwidth per month. You're only paying $10 per month, and your websites are exponentially faster. Voxel is the difference from your images taking 1.5 seconds to load to 0.1 seconds to load.

Even better news: Voxel's CDN services have the ability to run in origin-pull mode, which means setup is very, very easy for most websites.

I've written another hub on How to Configure an Origin-Pull CDN on WordPress and Voxel. Feel free to read check it out. If you're using another CMS, you can either search for a how to online or ask me in the comments and I'd be more than happy to point you in the right direction.

• If you can't get your Site Performance fast enough to be considered "fast," it's not the end of the world.
• Google cares about the users moreso than anything else. Even if your website is fast, but has unoriginal or low quality content, you still probably will not rank very well. Quality content always comes first.