Anybody who has at least the slightest knowledge about search engine optimization would know that in recent times, more and more discussion have been going around concerning the speed of a website. The buzz is that Google will soon start to lay more focus on this as a ranking factor. I would say it is now time to revamp your website to load faster if you have not yet done so. Remember Google Panda and Penguin updates.
Google Indirectly Signaled The Issue
Just type “website speed test” into Google search and you will see “Pagespeed Insight – Google Developers”. This was the number 2 position but may vary depending on your location. This is a very clear indication that Google takes website speed seriously. Why would they provide this free tool if it were not relevant?
I would like to point out that the speed is a by page issues and as such may not be applied to the whole site. One page can load faster or slower than others depending on the content of that page.
As you test the speed of your web page, the tool returns a list of reports that are supposed to guide you as to what and how to modify your content for faster speed. Google also suggests certain metrics which can also help as guidelines. But you need to be careful in using them to measure the page speed. A lot of people consider the Time to First HTML File a measurement that tells you how fast the website was downloaded. However, it is not a good measure for page speed.
Certain Discrepancies In Metrics
The problem with that metric is that there are no rules about what constitutes a valid HTML file and what doesn’t. Some file formats force websites to be downloaded instantly; some are not available for several minutes. And if you’re not measuring page speed with the Content Present metric, which considers the downloading time of HTML files, then you’re measuring the wrong thing.
The Content-Length metric is better to use because it accounts for both the downloading time and the downloading time of HTML files. You can’t simply compare the downloading time with the Content-Length metric and say that the HTML file was valid for 7 seconds and 5 seconds was wasted. That wouldn’t make any sense.
There are many free tools out there and it would be a shame not to make use of them.We at our SEO Company Convergent1 in Houston Texas use Gmetrix for page testing and have only high opinion about their tool. You get the list of issues as well as advice on how to rectify those same issues.
Download Time Metrics
Another metric that is good to use is the Page Load Time metric. It measures the download time of the entire page, both the downloading time of the HTML files and the downloading time of CSS files. That metric shows you that the page loads in 2 seconds, or half a second longer than the Content-Length metric would indicate.
It’s a shame that people are not careful when they measure the page speed of websites. The metric should be made so that one can easily compare the page speeds of different websites and make sure that there is no web page misalignment on the web pages. If a website has misaligned pages on the pages, it is likely that the user will face delays while waiting for the misaligned part to load. That’s a definite drawback and a major mistake that website owners can make. But in the long run, that could be a good thing, because misaligned pages are hard to use and use intelligently.
Final Words
To fix the misalignment of web pages, you can add the “center” tag to the headers and footers of the pages. Also, add the “text” tag to each paragraph, and use the center tag inside the paragraphs. There are rules that you have to follow to make the misalignment manageable. That is what web page optimization should be about. It’s not about building massive pages, but finding ways to make the pages look and load well. And it’s not about taking shortcuts.
