Site perfomance

Google officially incorporate page load time into their Quality Score.  It is their mission to provide the best search experience and slow loading pages does not provide that.  It is proven that even small delays in delivering web pages means the user is less likely to stay on your site and a significant delay could mean they browse away from your site without even seeing it once.

A website with a content management system typically does some processing which takes time and this has to happen even before it sends data over the internet.  Configuring your site correctly can mean your site does little or next to no processing to serve a page so it can send them almost instantaneously.  Sending the page isn't the end of the story.  A stylesheet file is sent that determines how the page should look and images, often many images must again be requested from the server.  There can even be many other files that provide an enhanced experience to the user such as animations.  Each file requested requires your computer to talk to the server and then the server to respond.

Clearly there are many factors that need consideration and each has their own solution.  These are typically:

• Compressing files
• Sending files simultaneously
• Aggregating or combining multiple files reduces the number of requests