We are at SMX Advanced London today – just heard a great talk by Mikkel deMib Svendsen (@deMib) on getting rid of stuff on your website which will speed up your site. The relationship is like this : the faster your server responds, the faster the site is crawled. The faster the site is crawled, the faster new content is indexed. The more you update your site, the better rankings you could get.
1 – Check text to code ratio – count characters in clean text compared to full code. If it is below 10%, you need to do something about it.
2 – Get rid of view_state – it takes up loads of space. (40,000 useless characters)
3 and 4 – Keep Javascript and CSS in just one external stylesheet
5 – Remove empty containers
6 – Remove all comment tags – it’s for programmers, not search engines. Use scripts to scrape out the comment tags.
7 – Minify or obfuscate code - removing spaces and line shifts reduce the file size and speed up rendering of pages.
8 – Remove unnecessary meta tags. Especially the revisit-after tag and page-rank tag as they hold no value.
Q&A Session and more great talks to come. Follow us @blueclaw.
Martin Woods: William we are saying the same thing, I agree that...
Barry Adams: The logic in Gary's 'solution' (and I use the term...
William Cross: Martin: google would never SEE the block. ONLY the...
Image optimisation is one of the best page load speed improvements and the other one is reducing http requests (combining js files and css files is good for that and so is css image sprites)
WordPress is difficult to ‘clean up’, as adding several SEO plugins adds several js/css files. Combining these files may make removing them afterwards very difficult, without being left with bloated css/js which is unused.