Webmasters and wiki admins are rushing to improve their sites’ performance after Google’s official announcement that page load times are now considered in the ranking algorithms.
Check out the performance gains we’ve achieved on RichmondWiki after a few updates in late May (from Google Webmasters, click to expand):
Time Spent Loading Pages
Average Page Load Times
Faster load times results in Googlebot crawling more pages. This leads to faster indexing of new and updated content and better organic search rankings.
Pages Crawled Per Day
Here’s how we did it
1. Changed Hosts – The wiki is now hosted entirely on DreamHost. We finally were able to leave Network Solutions and the problems associated with their service. I believe this had the greatest impact on the performance of the site.
2. Upgraded to MW 1.15.3 – Part of the problem on NetSol is that we couldn’t run the required shell scripts to upgrade the MediaWiki installation. We were stuck on 1.13.3 for about a year too long. Other than the performance gains, the added security and additional features of each new version makes it a no brainer.
3. Updated extensions – Keeping the core installation up-to-date is a good start, but your extensions need to be updated as well. Again, it helped improve the speed of our MediaWiki installation but also helps keep it secure and more user-friendly.
4. Updated to Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking Code – The newest version of the GA tracking code loads independently of the rest of the page (hence, “asynchronously”) and doesn’t slow down the rest of the site if it “hangs” or is slow to load from Google’s servers.
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