Google Caffeine: run as fast as you can

Search (or mathematics)

A friend who works for the Times once told me the following story. The digital department had spent many hours redeveloping their website. They had tinkered with the site architecture, the wireframe and page design, and they had experimented with different types of content: audio, visual and interactive.

Everything was ready to be demonstrated to the man from Google who was visiting their offices in Wapping as part of a tour of British publishers. He listened to everything that he was told, before politely enquiring, ‘How long does it take one of these pages to load?’

This is a useful story for people involved with developing websites. Google were, are, and will be for some time to come, a company of mathematicians. For the most part, their brains do not function in the same way that a publisher’s might. They deal in quantifiable data: in server calls, backlinks, IP addresses and – among a hundred other metrics – load speeds.

Google’s announcement on Friday that it is going to discriminate against slow-loading websites is not much of a surprise. Here is a basic list of three things that could slow website or blog down:

Three things that slow down a website

1. Too many images on a page (or too many unoptimised images). If you run a blog, you might want to consider cutting down the number of posts that are loaded on the home page. Do you really need to show 10? – If you have a large website, filled with many images, then you should have a spite map to cut down the number of server calls.
2. Too many analytics packages Many websites are stuffed with analytics packages that are designed to spy on the visitors like the Stasi spied on the East Germans for 30 years after the War. If you’ve got Clicktale, DC Storm, Google Analytics and Crazy Egg set up on one page, then you should really consider taking a few of them off.
3. Too much external embedded media If you link to Twitter, You Tube and Delicious from your blog or site, then you have to wait for each of these to respond every time you load up a page. Out of all of these, Twitter is the most likely to hold things up.

Tools

Obviously the speed that any webpage loads is determined by many different factors, not least the speed of a user’s Internet connection. Here are a couple of resources that you can use to test out loading time/speeds:

Web page analyzer – good for calculating page size, composition and download times

Yslow – From Yahoo – good for suggested improvements

Web Page Test (org) – full of charts, graphs, datawaterfalls and other good things

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Image credit: miss blackbutterfly on flickr