Did you know that site load speed can be crucial in being successful in Adwords campaigns and allegedly also in organic search results ranking. There is a free SEO tool that can help you determine whether your site is a slow loader or spot on.

The load speed checker is situated at 1&1 hosting provider’s website and can be found by clicking on Speed Checker. It was developed by German specialists at ANW.

Why Google takes into consideration load speed anyway? Because the guys at Google are aiming at 100% relevancy by giving the visitors the best search results. Here is why all SEO experts keep on iterating that you should create and optimize sites for visitors and not for search engines. It is an important SEO factor. A site that takes lots of time to load is annoying and a visitor is likely to click away. This is what we call a bad surfing experience. Once the visitor is gone, he is gone, he won’t be coming back!

That’s why load speed is officially a part of a so called ranking system of Adwords - its base figure of course is the bid, however, other attributes are considered as well. It is not said officially but according to many experiments and case studies, organic Google search results can be affected by site’s load speed. So if there are two similarly optimized sites, the fastest one will show on top.

The speed results of 1&1 SEO tool are ranked from 1 to 10, latter being the best i.e. the fastest. You also get a detailed report suggesting the main faults of your site. It gives you:

  • The information about the server platform,
  • Total size of your page (html + images)
  • Expected loading times on different connections
  • Suggestions for improvement
  • List of elements larger than 20 kB

It can also give you grounds for approaching your hosting company if you suspect they are not giving you the best service. So, if your total page size is below 100 kB but the tool gives you mark lower than 7, you might have problems with your server.

To finish, we will give you a couple of suggestions on how to bring the total page size down:

  1. Make sure you don’t use outdated and unnecessary HTML tags and attributes as <font> or table formating. It all should be done through CSS style sheets. Also delete all extra whitespaces and non-breaking space tags.
  2. Review your HTML code and delete everything that is not essential, check the validity of your HTML using the w3 validator - it will usually suggest parts that can be edited or even deleted to allow for a clean code.
  3. Include in your CSS style sheet only elements that attribute to your site’s design. No matter how we preach, some webmasters will keep copying CSS files from other webmasters and clutter their CSS with unneeded formatting. A good CSS is 2 - 4 kB large. You don’t need more!
  4. Use relative linking (/subfolder/page.php) instead of absolute linking (http://www.example.com/subfolder/page.php) where possible. This trick can reduce your HTML output size by as much as 5 - 10%.
  5. Don’t use PNG, BMP or TIF image files. Use JPG for photos and GIF format for pictures instead. When creating your gifs, convert files to paletted colour scheme manually. There are maximum of 256 colours to be included in a gif image map. For web, you usually don’t need so much. Simpler GIF files look good enough with 64 colours, more sophisticated - 128 colours. You can set the number of colours in your graphic editor’s settings before you convert a file to GIF. A small 80×80 px image converted to 256 colour GIF is 6.2 kB, the same image converted to 64 colours is 3.2 kB!


Although having a clean, validated code is not crucial for ranking high in Google (before shouting, drop me a line and I’ll show you an example of a dirty code ranking #1), MSN is allegedly known as a lover of a validated HTML. Keep your code clean and pages as lightweight as possible, this will help your SEO and make visitors come back!

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