Is your website fast enough for Google?

Google recently came up with its netbook-centric operating system 'Chromium' but at the same time released its source 'openly' to the public.  Therefore it is available to anyone to download free and furthermore allowing developers to play around and tweak the system as they like.  

I cannot stop thinking that we are going back to the times where the mainframe was actually the computer.  Much like Sun's old assumption that the network is the computer. With the release of Chromium, Google is putting more emphasis on the initiative that browser-based applications are the future and is coming up with their first true cloud-based operating system. 

Several tests have already been performed by leaders in the information technology industry and results were interesting.  One of the main results was that Chromium is a very fast operating system.  At a recent press conference Google claimed that Chrome OS had a boot-time of 7 seconds and this isn't an exaggeration at all.  

Performance of applications running on Chromium browser essentially comes down to the speed of the Chromium browser. That makes us realise that the new rule of thumb for Google could be 'speed'.  

Google certainly have the power to simulate and estimate the amount of time it takes to connect to a page, the way and amount of time a page renders in a browser, and how people react to those times to influence how a page is ranked, classified, and how much of the page is crawled and indexed.  This will also include embedded material on a page such as javascript or flash content.

Therefore pages that are loaded quicker have a better chance to get crawled frequently, indexed and have a better search visibility compared to pages that are loaded more slowly.

Below is a short list of page-loading tips that I thought might be helpful:

• Avoid overloading a website with images since large files take longer to load.

• Javascript has some advantages over Flash.  Flash is overdone and takes longer to load and sometimes makes websites over-complicated.  However, it is recommended to place Javascript files in an external file.

• In case videos are hosted on the website, it is better to host the videos on YouTube and provide a link from your website than hosting it directly on the website.  YouTube is so big that it has the ability to load videos quickly.

• Avoid "Enter Site" introduction pages, they have a high load-in-time and are so 'old-school'. It's better to let visitors go straight to the information.

• Keep the mark-up simple.  Most HTML tags can be styled via an external CSS so there is no need for them to be placed in a nested table for example.

• It is recommended to use XHTML and CSS to start out a website, using tables for layout is not recommended since they can cause a big mess in the mark-up language and finally slows down the loading times.  Storing CSS information in an external file keeps your website neat and ensures a fast page-load time.

• Server side compression software are also very useful, they ensure files are at their optimum size prior to being sent to the client browser, this works particularly well for script (e.g. PHP) and CSS files where the focus is not on semantics.

• Images must be optimised at the correct seize/weight.  This is important because large image files will take a much longer time to load than a lighter image that has already been processed by an image editing software.  However this may implies some compromises on the picture quality.

• Images should ideally be used only for headers or logos and never for large bodies of text.  Static text takes only a few bytes as compared to images that consume thousands of bytes.

The new Google race is now opened, is your website fast enough?