Google Page Speed – Site Performance

As has been made quite popular over the last few months, the speed of a website is becoming an increasingly critical factor to its corresponding position in Google – and rightfully so. I, personally, have seen a number of slow, poorly constructed websites ranking highly for numerous keywords, and I am glad that this is quickly changing. Not long ago, Google released a new ‘lab’ called Page Speed, which allows you to now see what recommendations Google makes regarding your site’s performance. This is much more helpful than the old method of just seeing a graph in the Google Webmaster panel. So, let’s take a look:

http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/

I’m running this blog through the application:
“RunningOnlineBusiness.com got an overall Page Speed Score of 89 (out of 100).”

Looks pretty decent to me! Let’s take a look at the available warnings:

High Priority: None. This is great!

Medium Priority: Leverage browser caching. This is my only yellow warning, thankfully! The error is telling me that I need to set expiration periods for the images that I host using the Amazon s3 utility. This is a relatively simple task, but not one that is high on my list of priorities, due to the speed of Amazon s3, and the inexpensive cost of hosting such images.

Low Priority: Optimize images. Google recommends a few images that I should optimize so that visitors have a faster experience. However, the optimization that Google recommends would save the following amounts: “20.8KiB, 1.1KiB, 1.1KiB, 1.1KiB, 919B” While I do consider myself quite obsessed with performance, I won’t be optimizing any of these images. I prefer to maintain their quality than to chop off a few KiB of data. The 919B image is my logo, which certainly won’t be reduced in quality, regardless of the savings. If you do have an image that you’d like to optimize, try this site.

Defer parsing of JavaScript: “By minimizing the amount of JavaScript needed to render the page, and deferring parsing of unneeded JavaScript until it needs to be executed, you can reduce the initial load time of your page.” Google tells me that 139KiB of JavaScript is parsed during initial page load. While this isn’t anything drastic, deferring JavaScript parsing is a quick solution to shave a bit of time off the loading clock and something worth looking into. Let’s take a look at how to go about doing it:

W3C HTML 4.0 specifications instruct us to use the defer attribute in our script tags, as seen below. The solution? Locate javascript in your pages and add the defer tab. In my case, that’s now an additional 139KiB saved.

Minify CSS: Minifying the following CSS resources could reduce their size by 8.2KiB. Once again, a small amount of loss due to ‘unminified’ CSS resources. The catch here is that I minimize all of my CSS. These files are normally sized because they’re hosted somewhere outside of my realm of control. I suppose here I’ll have to accept my 8.2 KiB loss. I use this site to minify my CSS. Simply copy and paste a CSS file’s contents into the site I just linked, then copy the output and paste it into your file, deleting the original content first.

Minify JavaScript: “Compacting JavaScript code can save many bytes of data and speed up downloading, parsing, and execution time.” This is one thing that I’ve always put a lot of focus on. Many programmers out there write their JavaScript in a way that is more pleasing to the eye than to the performance of the system running the script. However, that’s where this nifty tool comes in handy. The process is the same as that of minifying CSS, detailed above.

Minify HTML: Following the pattern here? “Compacting HTML code, including any inline JavaScript and CSS contained in it, can save many bytes of data and speed up downloading, parsing, and execution time.” Google tells me, “Minifying http://www.runningonlinebusiness.com/ could save 1,011B.” However, before you go and minify your HTML, Google also greets us with the following warning, if you click to see more information, “This rule is experimental and is currently focused on size reduction rather than strict HTML well-formedness. Future versions of the rule will also take into account correctness.” For me, this is one rule to take with a gain of sand. It’s your personal determination as to whether size or well-formedness is more important right now. Personally, until clarification is given, I’m not minifying any HTML that I haven’t already.

Now that we’ve covered a few of the ways to improve site performance that Google recommends, the task we’re facing is to determine what will be making the list next, and how to stay ahead of the competition in our new-found age of performance-driven search engine optimization. However, never lose site of your mission – pleasing your visitors. Even if Google was to totally disregard your site’s speed and performance, such attributes would maintain their dire level of importance because, let’s face it: Nobody is going to choose to spend their time on a slow-loading, laggy site.

We’ve seen here that this blog’s Page Speed score is 89 out of 100.
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