Improve Page Load Times to Improve Page Rank

Last year Google said that load times would become a factor in determining your page rank. I have been toying with Joomla load times trying to speed things up and found two things that are very effective (and easy):

1. In the  >Global Configuration panel under >Server,  enable gzip compression (duh!)
   Using this, the content the server send the info to the browser compressed so bandwidth isn’t as big of an issue.
2. Install a CSS/Java compression plug-in. I used a plug-in CssJsCompress to great effect, be sure to configure Css/JS compression and enable the plug-in after you install it.
   Using this, the CSS and Java scripts are compressed.

The sites I have on godaddy have had no issues with these changes and I have measured significant improvements in load times.

More technical details can be found here: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

To test performance, I recommend using a combination of Firebug and Page Speed plug-ins in Firefox.

I am still investigating ways to speed up WordPress, if you have some recommendations let me know!

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