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Is Your Site Too Slow?

Posted on May 31st, 2007 in 100 Day Website Guide, Website Design by Scott

Day 13 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide

After you have created your website and written a couple of posts, it is time to start improving the site’s design.  One of the first things that you should focus on when you are improving your website is how long it takes to load.  A slow webpage can annoy your visitors, and it can also be a sign that your server won’t be able to handle a surge in hits.

The first thing that you can do to speed up your website is to make sure that you are running the wordpress plugin WP-Cache.  Wp-Cache is an extremely efficient system of storing your posts on wordpress so that they don’t have to be reloaded from the server each time someone visits.  In some cases, it can speed your site up by an order of magnitude or more.

So say that you’ve installed wp-cache, but your site is still loading slowly, how can you figure out what is holding it back?   Well this is actually extremely simple, if you are running Firefox.   Firefox has an extension called firebug which is extremely useful for a webpage designer, one of the functions, the one we care about today, shows you how long it takes to load each element of a webpage.

Looking at SavvyAffiliate.com using Firebug

savvy affiliate speed

I had 255 Kb which loaded in 1.89 seconds.  (I’m using a cable service for my ISP)   If I decided that my site was too slow, I could look and see what was holding it up.  Answer, several largish Image files from the post break out blogging.   I won’t be too worried about those since they will naturally be pushed off my blog front page with another couple of posts.  I don’t see anything too troubling on SavvyAffiliate, but I wouldn’t as I have already gone through and fixed some trouble spots.

 Now lets look at a site whihc I suspect hasn’t tried to optimize for speed.  StepenFung.net, who I choose at random from my list of reviewme peers.

fung speed

This site is in trouble in terms of loading speed.  It takes an incredible 1 and 1/2 minutes to load!  It makes me feel like I’m back in 1998 dialing up AOL on my 28K modem.  Some of the slow loading could be due to a slow server, another large part of it is due to a huge page.  His site is at least 1.6 MB.  He should strive to cut that down, but what should he cut?

 Luckily firebug shows the file size of each object.  Although not all the objects are on the screen (after all there were 120 of them) one which sticks out is the Func_033.js, some javascript programming running intellitxt.  It is 29 KB and took a 1.2 seconds to load, almost as much time as my entire site took to load.  He also appears to be running a lot of images and services off of other pages.  This can slow down your site dramatically as you have to contact numerous servers to load the webpage.

But you don’t really fcare too much about stephen fung (Unless you are him, in which case, How bout a reciprocal link?), and neither do I.

What Every Blogger Should Know About Google Sitemaps

Posted on May 16th, 2007 in Website Design by Scott

It’s Important To Submit Your Sitemap To Google, Luckily Its Incredibly Easy

Submitting your sitemap to Google is important to ensure that every page you published gets indexed.   After all if your page isn’t indexed in Google’s database, how are your visitors supposed to find it?

Luckily it is easier than ever for a blogger to create a sitemap and submit it to Google.  Any wordpress blogger an download and install the plugin Google Sitemaps Generator.  This will quickly allow you to create a sitemap for your page and have it automatically update whenever you create a post.

Once you have created your sitemap, submitting it to Google is just as easy.  Your next step is to make sure that Google knows about your sitemap.  You can submit your sitemap to Google at the Webmaster Toolssite.   All you need to do is register your page with Google, drop in the link of your sitemap, and you are done.

 As a bonus, once you start using webmaster tools there are many other handy features.  They include

  • Web crawl statistics - when your site was last updated
  • Robots.txt analysis - How Google’s search bot sees your site to be indexed
  • Page Rank Statistics - What ratio of the pages on your site have high, medium, and low page ranks
  • Inbound Links - What sites are linking to your page
  • Outbound Links - What sites your page is linking to
  • Keyword Analysis - An analysis of the content on your page, what keywords are the most common

Quick Guide To Google Webmaster Tools

Posted on May 16th, 2007 in Website Design by Scott

Google Has A Lost Of Webmaster Tools, How Many Are You Using?

Google has a ton of tools available to the average webmaster.  The best part is that they are nearly all free!   How many tools are you making use of?  Can one of them help improve your site?

  1. Analytics- The newly revamped analytics has everything that its predecessor was lacking.  It has an intuitive user interface.  Easy tracking of a wide variety of stats, and great integration into Adwords if you desire to use it.
  2. Webmaster Tools- Submit your site to Google and you can get information about Errors on your pages, how often your site was crawled, inbound and outbound links, how robots see your .txt file and much more!
  3. Site Status Wizard- Quickly check to see if Google has indexed your page and encountered any errors doing so. 
  4. Site Submission - Add your site to Google’s database to make sure that it gets indexed
  5. Webmaster Help Center- FAQS about how Google indexes your pages and ranks them.

Website validators

Posted on May 12th, 2007 in Website Design by Scott

It is very important that a webmaster validate his website.   The reason is that although the site may be working well for you, there are dozens of different browsers out there that people are using, and not all of them behave the same.

By going through some checks to make sure that you site is W3C compliant, you can ensure that all of your visistors are able to experience your page.

CSS Validator

HTML & XHTML Validator

4 Ways To Speed Up Your Site

Posted on May 2nd, 2007 in Website Design by Scott

Site Too Slow? Need Speed? Try These

1) Optimize Your Images - Make sure that your images are saved for web.  This will ensure that the images are saved using web colors, and will mean that your browser won’t have to convert them.

2) Use CSS - Css over HTML can save kilobytes of data per page.  If you are saving kilobytes of data, and are streamig to thousands of users a day, that can save significant bandwidth and significantly speed up your site.

3) Optimize Your CSS - Once you make your site with CSS, it is good to make sure the CSS is as good as it can be.  Clean CSS is an online tool which will concatante your CSS and remove unnecessary tags in order to optimize it.

4) Use Height And Width Tags On Images - Use height and width tags on your images on your images.  Many people forget to do this, but doing this will speed up your site.  Using height and width tags means that the browser can reserve a space for the image while it loads the rest of the page.  The images won’t slow down the rest of the page, meaning it will load faster.

10 Tips On Website Design

Posted on May 1st, 2007 in Website Design by Scott

1) Don’t Break The Back Button - Above all, keep the back button intact.  There is almost nothing more annoying than going to a site and finding that you can’t navigate out of it.  I never go back to sites that have broken back buttons

2) If You Use A Spam Catcher, Make It Readable -If you are using a spam catcher on your comments, i.e. a JPG that people can read but software can’t, make sure that people can actually read it.  If it is too complicated you will anger your users as they try and fail two or three times to enter the correct page.

3) Don’t Play Music- Don’t play music on your webpage.  People come to your site to read the content, or even to look at the pictures.  Sites which suddenly play music are annoying and can potentially get the user in trouble if they are at work

4) Don’t Resize the Window - Your visitor should be able to control where the browser window is and what size they want it to be.  Don’t mess with it

5) Don’t Use Pop Ups - First it is very annoying to visitors.  Second there are many toolbars which automatically block the pop ups, so you will anger your visitor and they won’t even see your ad

6) Open Links in The Same Window - Don’t try to trick users into staying on your page by opening the links in a new window.  If they want to open links in a new tab or a new window, they can right click and do it themselves.  The default link option should always be opening in the same window.

7) Make Your Navigation Simple - Make sure that your user can get to anywhere on your site with a minimum of clicks.  All your navigation should be displayed on every page

8) Don’t Use Intros- Don’t your webpage load with a flash intro.  People didn’t come to your site to look at intros, they came to look at your content

9) Don’t Require Sign Up - Don’t make people sign up on your page to read your content.  Additionally, unless you get mass amounts of spam comments, don’t make people sign in to leave a comment.  I already have too many user names and passwords to remember.  I don’t need another one on your site.

10) Check Your Color Scheme -  Get a couple people whose opinions you trust too look at your site and comment on your color scheme.  Does it give them a headache?   If it does, then it will probably do the same for the rest of your visitors.  Use more toned down colors whenever possible.

Getting Static Links To Work

Posted on April 16th, 2007 in Website Design by Scott

I am currently hosting on Godaddy using the economy Linux plan.  I had some difficulty getting permalinks to work, i.e. changing from the ugly ? webpages to the pretty ones.

 Here are the two sites which helped me do it

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/69200

http://www.napy8gen.com/p_enabling_wordpress_permalinks_for_godaddy_hosting.html

 Good luck to you