Last year Google announced that its ranking algorithm would start to factor in web site page-load times, and that pages that load faster would gain an advantage over their slower competitors.
If you’re worried about the load times of your web pages there are useful tools out there that can help. We have been using the Yahoo YSlow plugin for the Firefox browser. It measures your site and gives you a rating (a bit like the energy ratings you see for domestic appliances). It also provides instructions for your webmaster to speed things up, if required.
Google also provide a similar service called page speed. And now, they’re making the job of speeding up your web site much easier, with a module for Apache Servers:
So today, we’re introducing a module for the Apache HTTP Server called modpagespeed to perform many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen modpagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) — in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/amDG/~3/ntJWDjvpWMA/make-your-websites-run-faster.html
We’ll be testing this out in due course, and we’ll let you know how we get on.
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