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Google has recently announced that it will add another factor for search engine rankings - Site Speed. According to Matt Cutts, head of Google's anti-spam team: “If you're a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much”

This does not mean that you need to get your site load fastest on the earth. It means that on relative terms, your site speed needs to be better than your competitors for the same set of keywords.

How to prepare your website for better speed?

There are various factors which influence the speed of the site:

1. Hosting server: The server architecture and configuration contributes significantly to the server speed and subsequently website loading. Its important to have a fast server with optimal configuration to acheive good website loading time.
2. HTML code: A valid html/css will have sleek code as compared to table based html and helps in achieving better speed.
3. CSS File size: The CSS can be optimized by using shortcuts, grouping selectors with the same properties and values together.
4. Images Size: A well designed web page will have multiple images. But improperly used images can increase the web page size decreasing the load speed of the page. So, its better to remove unused images from the code. For other images, optimize them by converting them into png. The use of jpeg files is adviced when high quality photographs need to be displayed. Also, have the actual image size be same as the display size.
5. Javascript files size: Javascript files need to be compressed so that the size is reduced. Also, limit the no of js files to be 2 to 3 by merging the files. If any js file is required for a particular web page, include that file only on that page rather than on the general template.Caching: Caching is very important for dynamic websites where the page content is called from the database. Caching reduces the load time by saving the static version of the dynamic page and display that without any database query.

There are lot of other factors which can help increase the page speed but taking care of these basic steps will significantly improve the loading time and user experience.

Drupal India specializes in Drupal SEO and improving site performance. One of our recent sites runs about 2000 concurrent users.