Matt Cutts, a software engineer and an eloquent corporate spokesman for Google, spoke at PubCon earlier this month and later gave a video interview to Web Pro News, in which he said that the speed at which web pages are available might become a factor in SEO moving into 2010.

While Google hasn’t officially said this is going to happen, having as fast a website as possible is a very good thing, for your users and for you.

So, let’s look at a few ways you can improve the speed of your site.

1. Compression

Most, if not all, of the major web servers available today offer some sort of compression. What that means is they serve out the content to your browser in a certain way, much like a ZIP file, that your browser can read and deflate very quickly. Smaller files sent = faster site.

Now, how you set up compression differs by what web server you are using and what platform your server is.

In PHP, it can be as easy as adding one line of code to your site. Like this:


<?php
ob_start("ob_gzhandler");
?>


If you’re using Apache and only serving out HTML, you should look into the mod_gzip apache plugin. It compresses text files on the fly. Here are some instructions for IIS, though there are also commercial plug-ins you can buy to achieve the same result.

Sometimes you may not have access to the actual server or root access to install some of these services. No worries – some CMS and blogging systems offer plug-ins to achieve some of these things.

I’m a WordPress nut, so on all of the installs I run, one of the first things I always install is WP Super Cache, created by Donncha O Caoimh. This plugin will cache pages of your site for super fast loading, it will compress HTML, if enabled. This plugin also works in MU, and I’ll blogging that later.

Not sure its worth it? Check for yourself. There are many sites on the web that test your site and see if you are compressing data. Here’s one that quick and easy to use. For this site, by using compression I’m saving almost 75% in terms of the amount of data sent. Faster sends = faster site loads for users.

2. Cut Down On Stuff

Compression is great, but if you site is pulling in a million assets, widgets from third-party sites, and three or four Javascript libraries, it won’t make any difference. If you can, cut down on the number of calls, minify your javascript libraries and determine something like that Facebook fan box is absolutely critical to a page.

I think we’re all a bit guilty in the broadband era of not worrying about how much our page weights are. It’s worth looking at, especially as more and more web surfing is done on mobile devices.

Want to see how much stuff your code is calling for? Check out Firebug for Firefox or use Safari’s built-in Web Inspector. You may be surprised what you see.

3. CDN

Serving some of your static content (images, CSS, js) from a content delivery network will increase the speed of your site. These assets don’t change very often, so why not let a very fast network serve them out.

There are a ton of options out there, from very expensive to not so expensive, but the two I’d recommend are Amazon S3/Cloudfront and Rackspace’s Cloud Files.

Those two are inexpensive, easy to use and very fast. The few bucks a month you’ll pay are well worth it.

4. Semantically Strong Code

Last but not least, if you write clean, good code, your site will load very faster.

If your code is a mess, or god forbid, you’re still using a layout method like tables, your site is going to take longer to come down the pipe and also render out for the user.

Are there easy things I’m missing? Leave a comment and let me know.

1. Videos and Podcasts

Putting your videos and podcast audio in the cloud is a no-brainer. In fact, it’s the first thing we did in S3 a few years ago. Not every video we produce is meant for YouTube, or perhaps you want to have a really nice, high definition embed on your site, that’s what sites like Amazon’s S3 were made for.

Why? If you’ve got a large number of video files and audio files living on the same server as your college’s website, you could be potentially taking away cycles and bandwidth from your site. What happens when one of your videos goes viral? It has the potential to slow down your site and negatively impact the experience of your site’s visitors who are there to find out more about you.

Here’s an example of a video we produced that we hosted in S3. The HD video downloads quickly and it put no strain on my campus server.

2. WordPress Media

I’m a huge fan of WordPress. We’re rolling it out departments across our campus. They will want to upload PDF files, images, and lots of other content to go along with their blog posts and pages. That content can pile up pretty quickly, so why not put that uploaded content into the cloud? You can do it manually or use the Amazon S3 Plugin for WordPress, which will allow you to upload media to S3 and have it be displayed in your blog. It will also create thumbnails of your images and upload them as well.

I’ve been using this plugin on this blog for a while and it’s worked really well.

3. PDF Files

PDF files can get big and if your site is like mine, they are spread out all over the place. Our PDF files range in size from 50k for forms generated from Word to 11 or 12 MB for our athletics media guides.

I’ve been trying to put all our PDF files in a central spot in our S3 account so they are easy to find and update when needed, and during peak times of use, such as right now when students are downloading and completing forms before coming back to campus in a few weeks.

4. CSS and Javascript

Since your site’s CSS and javascripts will get cached after the first visit, why not serve them from S3? It’s fast, seamless to the end user, and since they are cached, you’ll barely notice they aren’t coming from your web server.

5. Images

Maybe S3 isn’t the perfect spot form which to host every image on your website, but it’s a great spot to host galleries, large hi-res version of your photos or serve as a backup spot for your image collection. I keep a bunch of critical PSD files in S3 so that they’re save if my hard drives and other backups fail. Obsessive? Maybe, but having lost critical data in a hard drive crash a few years ago, I’m much more obsessive about backups and having redundant copies of things.

So there you go – five easy, quick things you can start to do in the cloud file storage platform of your choice, be it Amazon or Rackspace.

Cloud Servers will be priced per instance hour and will start at $0.015 per hour ($10.95 for a full month of usage). Since you only pay by the hour, it will be really easy and affordable to spin up a new instance for testing or development—and then simply remove it when you’re done.

I’ve finally had a chance to log in and start up a few Cloud Servers and let me tell you, I was very impressed. The administrative control panel is easy and quick to navigate around, the servers started up quickly and accessing them via SSH was a breeze.

Here are a few other thoughts I had from spending an evening with Cloud Servers…

I like the fact you can make backups and they make automatic daily, weekly and monthly backups of your data. If you are worried about losing data, you may want to do automatic backups more often. If your Cloud Server instance happens to crash, they are able to migrate some data. They say:

One of the most significant differences between Cloud Servers and EC2 is the persistence of each virtual server. Cloud Servers has access to local, RAID10 disk storage—much like you’d expect in a physical server. This is important because it means your Cloud Server has inherent protection against drive failures. If for some reason the host does fail or become degraded, we will restart and/or migrate your cloud server for you. A failure doesn’t mean that your cloud server goes away.

Keep in mind – similar to EC2, if you shut off your instance, your data is lost.

I like the different varieties of OS available, including CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo and Red Hat. Because of licensing issues, if you use Red Hat, you will pay a little more for your server. Amazon does this with EC2 servers running Windows.

I found connecting via SSH much easier to do compared to Amazon’s system of keypairs and certificates. Cloud Servers give you a root password. I’m not saying Amazon’s way is bad or Cloud Servers are less secure, but it was easier to just grab the password and connect. This may be useful if you have multiple people working on a Cloud Server instance.

I very much like the fact you can run a server for $11 a month + bandwidth costs.

One thing I like about EC2 is the fact you can get machine images pre-configured for a multitude of uses – LAMP, ROR, video encoding and more. When you start a Cloud Server, you’re given a blank slate. When I started my first instance, I wasn’t sure how to even get Apache installed and running, though I eventually found their extensive help documents. BTW, I installed Apache on CentOS using this:

sudo yum install httpd mod_ssl

In the end, I’m sure this could all be automated but it would be great if Mosso would let you save a setup or suite of apps you’d like to have installed at startup. I’d wait a few more minutes for my server to be live if I didn’t have to manually install Apache, MySQL and PHP every time.

Overall, I’m very pleased with Cloud Servers. Ease-of-use coupled with Rackspace’s support makes this a strong player right out of the gate. I know I will definitely include them when planning new web apps in the future.

Here are a few screenshots I took while spinning up my server.

[nggallery id=1]

Mosso’s offerings were pretty straight-forward. For $100 a month you got a server you could develop your application on in a variety of languages and they would automatically handle scaling your app as needed. We tried it out for a bit and it worked well and as advertised.

Yesterday, Rackspace announced several new offerings, but one in particular caught my eye – their Cloud Servers product.

Cloud Servers will be priced per instance hour and will start at $0.015 per hour ($10.95 for a full month of usage). Since you only pay by the hour, it will be really easy and affordable to spin up a new instance for testing or development—and then simply remove it when you’re done.

$11 a month for a cloud server with 256 MB of RAM and 10GB storage space? Sign me up right this second. These servers will be available starting Monday, March 16. I will try them out and report back how they are. Here are additional costs and specs. Click for a larger version.

I wonder how Amazon will respond to this?

You can read more about their cloud servers and Rackspace’s other announcements here.