Does anyone know an optimal download speed for a website page?
Would anyone share how far does Google reduce search results through slow loading website pages? And I would also like to know how to speed up website pages loading?
Thanks in advance.
Optimal download speed is as fast as you can make it! The faster your site loads, the better, particularly from a user’s perspective. Google is unlikely to be bothered by the difference between ‘fairly quick’, ‘fast’ and ‘super speedy’ … but it will slap you with a penalty if your site is really slow. It isn’t about rewarding sites that squeeze every last millisecond out of the servers, but about pushing very slow sites down the rankings if there are better alternatives that don’t keep you waiting for ages and ages.
For more tips on speeding up your site, have a read through the ‘Web Design’ forum.
There are also very good tools to help you out locate and fix bottlenecks in your website design.
I would recommend you Page Speed for Firefox, it will tell you which bottlenecks are critical and suggest how to fix them, it even resizes and compress images for you.
Use gzip deflate to compress your website prior to sending to the client, compress CSS and JS files into one file each, remove unnecessary spaces, tabs, etc.
With small images you might want to create a sprite, so that clients make less http requests, here is a good tool to make sprites: http://spritegen.website-performance.org/
You can also use CDN (Content Delivery Network) to fetch files from other servers, for example if you use jquery, you can fetch the jquery file from google servers: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js
These are just few of the things you can implement to speed up your website, combined they really make a difference.
Cheers!