How to Increase Your Site’s Performance

Late last year, Google’s Matt Cutts told WebProNews that site performance would be a critical factor this year. Since that time, site performance has been a hot topic in the SEO community. Incidentally, Maile Ohye, also from Google, calls this area an “uncharted SEO territory” in a recent interview with WPN.

According to her, simple changes to the front end, such as how you order the style sheets and JavaScript files, can have a big impact on speed and, ultimately, conversions. She references a test that Strangeloop conducted in which it compared the site performance of an optimized site to the site performance on a non-optimized site. The test found that the optimized site had a 16 percent increase in conversions over the non-optimized site.

Ohye explains the importance of ordering style sheets and JavaScript files since it could save visitors seconds when visiting your site. She suggests having statements at the top that bring in the style sheets first followed by the Jav