Google now partially rates your website based on speed. However don’t panic…. accordion to SitePoint Google says while site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of the page.

At the moment fewer than 1% of search queries are effected by the site speed signal.

Here are 5 ways to boost the performance of your website:

1. Optimise the image size. The obvious one, and had to come first although everybody already must know about this but I thought to share a few good tools for this. In terms of page weight, images are normally the biggest contributor. If you have access to a professional photo editing software such as Photoshop or Fireworks, then they all come with image optimisation feature. I normally use Jpg format for most images and all photos and keep the quality something between 80 to 90 %.  If you need to keep transparency then you need to use gif or png format.If you need to do batch resizing then this is a useful tool I have used before: http://www.vso-software.fr/products/image_resizer/. You can download a free trial to test it out.
2. Use good tools to analyse the performance and identify bottlenecks. There are many performance analysis tools out there. Having tested most of them here are my favourites:http://tools.pingdom.com/ to see how long it took for the page to load and a breakdown of files downloaded. Great to immediately see which files are not optimised.http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/ to get an easy to follow report on areas you can improve. Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them. If you haven’t already installed Firebug for Firefox, I highly recommend it. You will love it.http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ Similar to Google page-speed tool ( bullet point 2), but by Yahoo.
3. Combine external CSS and Javascript. Instead of embedding the CSS or JavaScript code within the html link to a Js or CSS file (include) and keep the number of includes to a minimum. For example instead of having 5 different JavaScript includes, combine them into one. The aim here is the number of calls to files to a minimum.
4. Specify image dimensions. If you don’t specify the image width and height the browser can work it out but it will take additional resources. So best to specify the exact width and height.
5. Keep the HTML lean and clean. Make sure your website developer keeps the HTML table free, CSS driven and comply with standards. A good quality and complying website should ideally be error free when validated here: http://validator.w3.org/

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