Time to speed up your site

Lately google have been penalising websites which are not responsive or rather do not have a mobile variant and this has affected a lot of websites as the full roll on gets under way. No it seems that google are about to hit websites based on how quickly they load on a mobile browser, now this makes sense as if you are on mobile then more than likely on a slow(ish) connection such as 3g and they want to reward those sites which are thinking about speed and overall user experience. I have clicked on many sites and at the least been frustrated by a slow loading website and even given up after a few seconds and gone back to the search results. now google will mark a website as being slow in the search results and that will really hit click rates. Although xara webdesigner is very good at creating fast sites I have seen many which are slow mainly due to images, for instance having a photo as a PNG when jpg would be a better format or just not optimising the image or having too many images etc, of course you could optimise to perfection but still be let down by slow hosting. I personally use http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ to test the speed of the site and it gives great feedback about file sizes etc.

http://searchengineland.com/google-t...results-223142

I prefer http://gtmetrix.com/ it gives a more detailed list of items that can be altered to speed up downloads. Some you can alter with Xara generated sites, some which I've no idea how to achieve. But I usually get Xara sites up to a high "B" rating by just tweaking two or three recommendations.

One of the best things that you can do is to limit the use of google/typekit fonts, I try and limit to one font of two weights, or at the most two separate fonts. But unfortunately I am sure that you have found that ultimately the speed of the hosting server brings the average score down a considerable amount.