When assessing your attorney website, be aware that the speed of the website happens to be one of the most important factors, both for the usability to your potential customers but also for search engine rankings, performance and profitability. Google recently updated the algorithms of their search engine ranking to take the speed of a website into account. In fact many law office website owners are finding, to their dismay, that potential advertisers are visiting websites to check out the speed prior to purchasing advertising. We Americans are becoming increasingly impatient, expecting our websites to load almost instantaneously. Even though I lived through the dial-up age of Internet, like everyone else I find myself closing pages that take longer than a mere nano-second to fully load. Although we may want to believe that broadband has triumphed and we no longer need to worry about speed, this is far from the truth. So, how does this need for speed we are engaged in affect your attorney website?
Webmasters must be highly cognizant of the speed issue and must know how to fully optimize their sites for speed. Toward the end of 2009, it was ever-so-gently suggested that Google would eventually be introducing the speed factor into their current algorithms, and, lo and behold, that day has arrived. Google’s site performance actually details the average time it takes the Google bots to download your indexed pages, and has a section known as “Let’s Make the Web Faster,” which will give you some excellent articles on the speed subject as well as tools to increase your speed. To get started on your search for speed for your law office websites, consider the following:
Optimizing Page Loading Speed
While optimizing images used to be a more difficult task, most graphic editors of today have special features which allow you to optimize images for the web—in other words, with a few clicks you can easily turn a 100kb file into 20kb with little loss of quality. Keep in mind that simply re-sizing an image using the height and width tags, while making the photo visibly smaller, still remains essentially the same, slowing down your law firm website considerably. Rather than using large images, consider thumbnails which can be clicked on should your viewer want to see the larger version. Some web site building software has automated thumb-nailing options. Ditch the animations if you want to increase your page’s loading speed—while animations can be cute, consider carefully whether they are seriously effective for your overall attorney website presentation.
Using Tables Carefully
Should you be using tables on your attorney website, use them carefully. Browsers wait until all items in a table are loaded before rendering the content. Therefore, your user sees absolutely nothing until all components of the table are loaded, then it magically appears. A user can get impatient, however, and click off somewhere else rather than waiting for the table to finish loading. If you must use tables, split the content into header, middle and footer tables which will allow your user to a least see something while the page is loading, persuading them to hang around to see it in its entirety.
YSlow or Page Speed?
Don’t forget that your site’s speed is not always 100% about what’s on your pages—some hosting company servers tend to be notoriously slow, most especially in a shared hosting environment where there may be in the hundreds of sites on the same server. When testing your server’s response time, a quarter to half a second response time is great, while a few seconds is just too long. The Google Speed site is attempting to make Web browsing just as fast as turning the pages of a magazine, so if you are responsible for your lawyer website, you may be wondering where to go to get an overall idea of your site’s performance. Go to your Google Webmaster Tools account and log in; click on Labs, then Site Performance where your site’s performance data will be displayed, based on feedback from crawlers. YSlow does much the same as Google’s Page Speed tool, however YSlow provides a grade for each page you review, handing out “grades” for each examined element. Page Speed offers only a green check, yellow triangle or red warning symbol.
It is really well-worth the time, when considering law firm SEO, to also consider the loading speed of your law firm website pages. If you want to remain at the top, bringing in more traffic—and conversions—optimize your site so that it literally zips along and keep your clients happy.
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