SEO Warrior

Website Performance Traps

Website performance is important from two perspectives: the web spider’s and the web user’s. If your site has many thousands of pages, you will want to make sure your site response times are reasonable.

Very Slow Pages

Web spiders are busy creatures. If any of your dynamic pages are computationally intensive, the web spiders might give up waiting on your page to finish loading. In technical terms, this is called timing out on a request.

Dynamic pages aren’t the only issue that will cause a web spider to give up. If your website is running on a server that is hosting many other sites, it may be slow to respond because of the overwhelming load caused by one of the other sites. As a result, your website might take many seconds to respond. Another problem could be with your web host if it experiences network latency due to limited bandwidth.

You can do some things to remedy these situations. The basic idea is to speed up page transitions to any web client, not just the web spider. Consider using the following:

• Web server compression

• Web page caching

Web server compression

The best way to understand web server compression is to think of sending ZIP files instead of uncompressed files from your web server to your web user. Sending less data over the network will minimize network latency and your web users will get the file faster.

The same thing applies to web spiders, as the major ones support HTTP 1.1. In fact, search engines would appreciate the fact that they will ...