View more daily infographic round-ups here.

Biking and health:

Created by: Healthcare Management Degree

App hero vs. app hero:

Sleep is awesome (via Ultralinx):

The bottom line for most site owners though, is not the efficiency of the internet as a whole, but rather the financial sustainability of their websites. While there are many ways to make a site perform better in terms of converting visitors, one of the simplest, and probably most important aspects is simply to reduce the load time of your website.

If your site suffers from poor performance you could be missing out not only on sales and average visitor time on site, but also search rankings. Below I will discuss some of the negative impacts a slow loading site may experience, as well as a few ways you can correct the issue. In some cases, correcting the problem will cost you only some time, although it has the potential to really pay off in the long run.

Negative Impacts of Long Load Times
If your site takes too long to load this can have a number of negative effects including loss of sales, loss or rankings, and increased pay per click cost. It can even increase your hosting costs depending on the cause.

Loss of Sales
Let’s pretend for a moment that search engines just didn’t exist and rankings didn’t matter. People are impatient – if your site takes too long to load, many potential customers will simply give up and go elsewhere.

Broadband connections are growing incredibly fast in the US; however, according to a study posted at FoxNews this past July, approximately 10% of Americans still have dial-up internet access. If your site loads slowly, you may be alienating 10% of your potential customers.

The last thing you want to do is frustrate your visitors. If you do this, you may drive them away, never to return. If you can provide a fast loading efficient website, you will increase the likelihood that your visitors will make a purchase, and return again in the future.

Increased Pay per Click Costs
Only a few short months ago a post by Heather Lane at the Inside AdWords blog announced that landing page load times will affect a keyword’s quality score. The reason for this is quite simple: a fast loading website improves the end user experience. As a result, ads directing to a slow loading page will be given a lower quality score. This in turn will cause your keyword bids to be higher, costing you significantly on a per click basis.

Loss of Organic Rankings
We know two things for a fact. Google factors in load times with AdWords, and Google focuses on an improved end user experience. As a result, I for one am convinced that a site’s load time does impact overall organic search rankings. While this is likely only a small piece of the very large algorithmic puzzle, it does play a part, and if you can speed up your site, you just may be able to move your rankings up a notch or two.

Speeding up your site is unlikely to move your site from page 8 all the way to page 1, but it may be enough to move up a few positions.

Increased Hosting Costs
Assuming your load times are due to file size issues and not other server constraints, your hosting costs may be more than they need to be. This factor will vary a great deal based on the hosting company and the package you have chosen.

Many hosts now offer packages where a significant amount of bandwidth usage is included, resulting in a single flat monthly or annual rate. (LunarPages for example, has a $4.95 monthly plan with unlimited bandwidth per month.) If your hosting provider does put a limit on usage and you are using beyond the allocated max, you could be paying a fair bit in overage charges. If you fall into this category, optimizing your files to reduce bandwidth usages could save you a considerable amount of cash.

Issues and Fixes
There are a number of issues that can cause a site to load slowly. Below I have noted a few items that are fairly common and can be relatively easily corrected.

Issue: Un-Optimized Images
This is probably one of the biggest culprits out there impacting load time today. I have seen countless websites where image optimization is simply not done, resulting in significantly increased page load times. One of the biggest problems is when images are scaled down to fit the application.

Quite often webmasters will take a large image, and scale it down using the height and width attributes rather than physically resizing the image. What this does is then require the browser to load the full high resolution image, when it really only needs a fraction.

Let’s take this real world example. A client recently had a photo on their home page; the photo was 600 x 403 pixels, weighed in at 124.68 KB, and visually they had scaled the image to fit 473 x 317 pixels.

By resizing the original image to the desired dimensions, and then reducing the quality of the jpg to 70%, the end result was an image that looked identical on his website but weighed in at only 23 KB – that’s 101.68 KB smaller than the original. Using a simple filesize download calculator I found online, 101.68 KB would take 14 seconds to download using a 56 Kb modem, or about 2 seconds on your run of the mill broadband connection.

For broadband users 2 seconds may not seem like much, but remember, this is only for a single image. When you add up all other images and on-site components, the time can significantly add up.

Issue: Un-Optimized files
Another way you can speed up your sites load time is to have clean HTML, CSS, and other included files. Remove extraneous code from your files, and use CSS wherever possible. Every piece of old html code adds up in size, even if it doesn’t impact the visual site itself. I have seen many cases where links have been removed but the code remains accidentally, leaving something like:

This code, while as tiny as it is, does contribute to an increase in load time (and in this specific example, could also be seen as spam by search engines).

If your site makes use of CSS, consider compressing it to save on load times. You can do this by grouping identical styles to save space. For instance,

p {
font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size:12px
}

li {
font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size:12px
}

can be compressed by grouping these two styles, reducing the coding by half:

p,li {
font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size:12px
}

Again this may not seem like much, but when you add this up with all of the other little things, it can ultimately result in a significantly increased load time for the page as a whole.

Audio and video can also be compressed. If your site uses a fair bit of multimedia, see if you can compress these files a bit more than you have already. You may be able to save some load time here as well without impacting user experience.

Issue: Hosting Server

It is possible that your site is perfect in every way, but the culprit is simply your web host. It does not necessarily mean that your host is slow, but if you are paying for an account on an old archaic computer with limited system resources servicing 1000 websites, this could seriously impact your site’s load time. If you have worked to ensure that the site is well optimized for efficiency and the load times are still extreme, you may need to upgrade your hosting account to one more suited for your business needs.

If your site is a fairly basic, such as a static 8 page html site, then a slow server may have little to no impact, but if your site requires extensive database queries and the help of an intensive content management system, and serves up tens of thousands of visitors a day, then you may need to switch to a higher end dedicated server. If you have found that your server is the only problem in your slow load times, contact your host to see what they can do for you.

Issue: HTTP Requests

According to a post at the

Yahoo Developer Blog

, "80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, style sheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages."

The article discusses combining files in order to reduce the number of HTTP requests, largely by the use of CSS Sprites. They also discuss using image maps to combine multiple images, however, from an SEO perspective, this is not something that I would recommend as my experience has shown image-mapped links are not always followed by search engine spiders.

They go on to explain a vast number of rather technical aspects to speeding up a page. If you are a technical person capable of implementing advanced techniques, the

Yahoo Developer Network

is definitely something you should check out.

Load Time Tools

Before you undergo any changes to your site to resolve the slow load times, I suggest first finding a tool and benchmarking your progress. Record how long your site takes to load, and then try again after you have made an effort to correct the problem.

There are a number of tools out there that can help you calculate your load times. One such tool is WebSiteOptimization.com. This site specializes in optimizing the performance of your site in order to decrease bandwidth and load times. They have created a very simple

tool

which will give you the load times for the individual components of your site, which can give you a good idea where to start.

Summary

If you take a bit of time to speed up the load time for your website by optimizing your existing content and cleaning up your code, you may just find yourself making more sales. As an added bonus you may also find improved search engine rankings, which will then in turn increase your sales further. Depending on your hosting provider, you may even have a reduced monthly hosting bill. Decreasing the load time of your site is really win-win for everyone.

As the internet becomes more and more bandwidth intensive with an ever increasing stream of users and higher use applications, doing whatever we can do reduce the strain on the system will make for a faster internet for everyone. If every webpage on the internet could be reduced be even just 100 kb, the web would be a much faster place.

(How do you keep your site loading quickly? Post your comments on this article with your tips and tricks for reducing load time!)

Comments

Google Logo
(Photo Credit: Google )

Google made the change around February 8th, but it would be a month before a WebmasterWorld forum member discovered the change by sifting through several hundred pages of the AdWords FAQ. What would drive a person to do such a thing? Jkwilson78 says it was because of a poor keyword quality score, which means more money for not as good placement.

Judging by the suffering ROIs expressed by commentators in a previous article regarding Google’s new quality initiatives, not everybody is convinced cracking down on advertiser quality will help Google’s bottom line, or advertisers’. MSN, with its significantly higher ROI may be looking mighty attractive to advertisers lately, even if the volume is less.

But lower click volume for higher ROI is Google’s apparent goal. The philosophy: high quality advertisers provide higher incentive to click and better relevancy to searchers, and justify not only higher cost-per-click, but also an elitist placement scheme.  

Google’s relative silence about the change, though, leaves lots of room for speculation. They’re usually much more upfront about things that are not their core algorithm. It makes one wonder if Google is better-dealing smaller search marketers, who helped propel Google to glory well in advance of major brands, for big-budget clients. They do have shareholders to think about these days, and also the leverage of market share to make demands even in open auction settings.

I suppose it was inevitable.

At any rate (that being a higher rate), search marketers will from now on have to not only pay special attention to their web sites for organic search reasons, but also for paid search reasons. Load-time requirements shouldn’t be that much of a surprise—it’s been an algorithmic factor for some time.

The quality score is either negatively impacted or not impacted by load time—not positively influenced. It’s determined once a month, which leaves an obvious question: If my quality score is lowered, but then I fixed the load time, will I have to wait another month to see my quality score raised back to normal? Or, can load time, a good score for which doesn’t raise my quality score, restore the score to the original at all?

Google issued some tips for improving load times, which is all we get for now:

· Use fewer redirects.
· Reduce the page size by using fewer, smaller, and more highly-compressed images.
· Do not use interstitial pages.
· Minimize the use of iframes on your landing page.
· Contact your webmaster or webhosting provider to discuss other ways of improving your website’s load time.
 

A word of warning from Barry Schwartz: Watch out for dubious claims from hosting companies guaranteeing faster page load times, especially if they’re based on geographical proximity to Google’s servers. "Watch the hosting space, companies may be marketing higher Google AdWords quality scores guarantees with their hosting agreements."

Where there’s opportunity, there are opportunists. Some of the more skilled of them are working for el Goog these days.