All posts tagged Facebook Group

Monitor your site’s performance and optimize load times

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Jt Pedersen (http://www.facebook.com/jtpedersen) asked a question on our Facebook Group http://www.facebook.com/WordPressA2.

Jt’s QUESTION?

After reading this, a couple of questions came to mind:

  1. What technically constitutes a ‘page’ in a WordPress blog? Is it the current post, or the entire page including sidebars, as rendered at view time?
  2. The 100 link limit: tied to #1′s answer, or no?
  3. What happens to titles that exceed 70 characters?

Thoughts?

ANSWER:

Hey Jt

#1) What technically constitutes a ‘page’ in a WordPress blog? Is it the current post, or the entire page including sidebars, as rendered at view time?

Short Answer: The entire page, which includes, header, footer, main content, sidebar widgets comments etc…

Thank you to Andrew Miller – Your Search Advisor for confirming my answer.

Longer Answer: The WordPress CMS is broken up into 2 sections. Pages and Posts. A page is typically a static page, the content doesn’t change much – such as /about/ or /contact/ etc… examples on your site:

Page = http://jtpedersen.net/about/

Post = http://jtpedersen.net/2011/06/16/park-the-shiny-objectsremember-the-basics/

Analytics Reporter writes on their article:

“When developing a website, make sure that each page file size is less than 150 kilobytes.

I’m not sure on the exact page file size, is it 150kb as Analytics Reporter suggests or is it 100kb as Matt Cutts suggests.

But Google do confirm on their Technical Guideline documentation the following:

Monitor your site’s performance and optimize load times. Google’s goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for those users with slow Internet connections), and we hope that as webmasters improve their sites, the overall speed of the web will improve.

Google strongly recommends that all webmasters regularly monitor site performance using Page SpeedYSlowWebPagetest, or other tools. For more information, tools, and resources, see Let’s Make The Web Faster. In addition, the Site Performance tool in Webmaster Tools shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.

The Technical Guidelines document does not suggest an exact “file size,” so as a good practice, you should try to keep your page file sizes as small as possible, by optimizing images, compacting CSS code, compacting JavaScript code – along with any other suggestions you get when you run your site through http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/.

#2) The 100 link limit: tied to #1′s answer, or no?

Yes, the 100 link limit would be tied to a single post or single page.

However, according to this article  on design and content guidelines the links per page recommendation is:

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.

Again, Google does not specify an exact number, so you should use your own discretion - and keep the end-user in mind when creating external and internal page links. Maybe just link to the most relevant articles using clear and concise anchor text.

#3) What happens to titles that exceed 70 characters?

The webpage title is cut off after 70 characters. Google will add [...] to the end of the page title on the search results page.

Page Title that exceeds 70 characters

Page Title that exceeds 70 characters

The  SEO Title of this post is “Search Engine Indexing Limits – A Question via J.t Pedersen via our Facebook Group” this title has 82 characters including spaces etc…

Tools and Resources

Page Speed Online

Page Speed Extensions for Chrome and Firefox

Anatomy of a search result

Creating Google-friendly sites