Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

Monday is with us again and that means the weekend is over and ordinary people are getting back to work. I just love listening to traffic reports on Mondays because you get to hear about all the reasons why it's great to work from home.

Of course these days I don't work from home ... I've got an office downtown ... but when you don't live in a big city it's almost as good as working from home. It takes just five minutes from my front door to the office front door and in a small town there are no traffic delays so I don't have to speed and I don't have to rush ... I can just take my time.

Sadly it's not the same with websites and now that we may be seeing Google getting to the point where it's about to finally roll out its Caffeine update speed is once again getting into our thoughts more and more.

Some time ago when site loading speed was occupying a lot of my thinking I grumbled about the fact that Google didn't actually tell us how it was measuring that loading speed and where it was measuring that loading speed from.

Was Google measuring the time it took for the index page to load just once or did it go back and measure the site several times to get an average? Was it measuring site loading time from one particular place in the United States or was it measuring the loading time from single points in a variety of countries?

Well it seems that Google actually answered those questions back in December and I guess that will teach me to start browsing the Google webmaster forums because that's where the answer was.

And sadly the answer wasn't all that helpful really. Of course Google told us how they arrive at the speed figure but it might have been better if they had been measuring it from one single point ... unfortunately they're not.

The loading speed figure that Google now displays for a site in Webmaster Tools is reached by aggregating speed numbers based on the pages of the site "that were most frequently accessed by visitors who use the Google Toolbar with the PageRank feature enabled".

Perhaps that doesn't sound too bad until you stop and think about who accesses your site and the equipment they might use and where they might be located. So if the majority of people who access your site are in places other than the country where the site is hosted there is going to be some speed issues.

At the same time if the majority of people who visit your site do so using a dial-up connection then, when it comes to speed measurements you're basically screwed.

So, as speed becomes a more important factor in obtaining a good position in search engine results pages you're going to want to have your website hosted in the country where most of your visitors live ... actually hosted just down the road from where most of them live would be even better ... and you're going to want every visitor to have a super-fast Internet connection too.

Of course that's all said with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek but you are going to want to look at the way your sites are optimized and you're also going to need to think seriously about things like the number of DNS lookups that need to be made to get each page to load fully

Some of the pages further back in one of our important sites have seven DNS lookups per page and Google suggests that might be too many ... I'd hate to see what it says about the index page on that site because it's loaded with calls from our server and from several other servers as well.

The other speed issue that Google seems to have with a number of sites is the fact that gzip compression is not enabled on the site. If you don't understand how gzip compression works then do a search and you'll find just how quickly large file sizes can be turned into small ones.

Of course loading speed isn't just important from the point of view of good search engine placement. Even if you don't get most of your traffic from the search engines you will still need to focus on the loading speed of your web pages because those who surf adult websites are quick to move on to other sites when one of your sites loads slowly.

So perhaps it's time to rekindle some interest in loading speed. It's obviously important if you're chasing good search engine rankings and it's always been important if you're chasing sales here in adult.