Google will punish your site that loads slower and. Just get acquainted about it from Google’s own voice:
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.
The bolder above line emphasize a lot for those who are site owner, webmaster or a web author. So, if you don’t look-up your site performance right now and do some necessary step, then your site search ranking will get punished by Google.
So, How to speed-up a Site or a Blog?
First, test your site or blog speed by using any of following tools:
- WebPagetest – a web-based tool
- Browser Mob ‘s Instant Test tool – a web-based tool
- IntroSpectrum – a web-based performance monitoring tool
- Yahoo! YSlow – a Firefox add-on that integrated with Firebug.
- Page Speed – another Firefox add-on that integrated with Firebug.
Second, gather more information about speeding issue on Google’s dedicated “Let’s make the web faster“. There are lots of article and resources about site speed.
I found interesting article: Performance Unleashed: How To Optimize Websites and WordPress For Speed.
Techniques to Speed-up your Site or Blog?
- CDN (content delivery network),
- Upgrading to a dedicated server,
- Upgrading network equipment and running multiple data centers around the world.
The above all steps are effective way to speed-up but, those are costly enough. MaxCDN will cost you $99.
- My choice: CloudFlare (FREE)
CloudFlare is a good choice to choose. CloudFlare not only takes care site’s performance but takes care security also. Once your site become part of CloudFlare, its traffic get routed through their globally scattered network and they optimize the website performance and block threats, limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources.
Here is a performance report of Espreson.com after using CloudFlare:
But, if you go for CloudFlare pro account then it will cost you $20/mo = $20 x 12 = $240. This is much costlier choice to choose. But, we can opt to stick into its free version if price does matter. We can use it with W3 Total Cache, then that would boost good performance too.
So, try it. Show off your opinion on it.