Google will be rolling out Caffeine which is less revolution but more evolution.  The emphasis is on speed.  This makes sense when more and more people are using mobile devices to “surf the net”.  As such website performance is going to play a major roll in where your website appears in search results.

What does this mean for your business.  If you are currently established for productive keywords you may well lose position.  The effect on your business will depend on how you much you rely on Google to generate traffic /new  clients.  If search engine positioning is not important to you then you need to do nothing at all.  For everyone else it is already too late.  Caffeine roll out has already begun but which data centres will be updated when is anyone’s guess.

The need for action is between now and April 2010.  This initial period is likely to be fairly lenient with settings hotting up throughout the remainder of 2010.

Specifically your website needs to meet a target load performance level of less than one second.  Google’s own pages load speed are circa 0.6 seconds.  But then their own pages are very basic as they are more utilitarian than a commercial website.

We took our existing website  http://www.services-web-design.co.uk , which is slow at around 2.8 seconds,  as the basis to create our new website http://www.cirencester-website-design.co.uk.  In this process we reduced load time from the original site of  2.8 seconds down to just to 0.56.

How did we do it?

Firstly we created clean code for the website which validates to w3c standards.  This was the starting point.  We minimised the CSS and JavaScript code by stripping out all extraneous code and white space.  We minimized images and used CSS backgrounds to fill in the blanks.  We consolidated our script’s into a single file.  Off site we enabled Apache gzip to compress the files further and finally we used server side caching to extend the cache period of larger files.  In all we improved performance by 500%.

The biggest savings came from clean code and removing redundancy.  As website become older things get changed.  This often leaves pieces of code that are no longer in use but are still being read / interpreted by a web browser creating unnecessary  baggage reducing performance.

Of course up until now performance has not really mattered.  But now it does it needs to be addressed.  Both website’s mentioned above are available to view.  Our decision to rewrite the website rather than edit the old  was a concious one.  For us it was / is partly an experiment but commercially it was quicker and cheaper to recreate rather than a trial and error approach i.e. figure out what we would break if we took something away etc.

Other website ranking issues that Google Caffeine may introduce are as yet unknown.  So watch this space for more details.  We are keeping a very close our client websites metering changes and looking for commonality to identify trends.