Another holiday project for me was to work on reducing the load time for my pages. There were a few reasons for this:
- I was using bandwidth like it was going out of fashion and finally was about to violate my (very generous) limits
- My pages were taking a ridiculous time to load and it was just embarrassing
- Google have very publically been stating that page speed is important for ranking (and the whole web has focussed on this in 2010)
As such I used my webalizer log file analytics package to pull out the highest bandwidth files and I isolated that the moo tools js (I was using for some super simple text animation) and a promotion banner were using 40% of the bandwidth. Although this is stating the obvious usually 90% of the actual impact of the problem you are dealing with is driven by 10% of the problems. Webalizer is a great way (on bandwidth usage) of homing in on the causes. I did about 2hrs of work to hack everything around and reduced my bandwidth usage by 25%. The surprise for me was that I saw an immediate impact on my data:
All year my pages per visitor has been down substantially. Users were getting bored and leaving the site faster. Reducing the page weight by 40% increased my page views per visitor by 25%. What was really interesting about this is that it stood out in all my data. For example even though I should have cut total bandwidth usage by 40% it only went down 25% since the number of pages being downloaded from the site spiked substantially. This was awesome to see :)
