Easy Tips to Decrease AdWords Landing Page Load Time

March 10th, 2008
-- by beussery

Google recently announced that they will soon start including landing page load time as a factor in determining Google AdWords Quality Score. Here are a few simple and easy tips designed to help anyone decrease their load times and speed up landing pages. I’ve listed just a few below but, feel free to comment with more if you’d like.

Avoid 301, 302 and JavaScript redirects to your landing pages and don’t use interstitial pages.
Reduce or eliminate the number of session ID and arguments in landing pages.
Use absolute URLs for dependencies.
Use external CSS and move calls for external CSS to the top of the HEAD in your landing pages and just below the TITLE.
“Prefectch” landing page image dependencies near the top of the HEAD in your landing page HTML.
Keep page dependencies within the same domain. In other words, try to avoid framed content and/or any content dependancy residing at another domain from loading into your page.
Remove unnecessary “white space” in HTML code including text that is “commented out”.
Avoid embedded Flash content in your landing pages, especially when content in Flash is being pulled from another source.
Avoid animated gifs and unoptimized images of any type.
Reduce the total number of images in your landing pages and specify their size in the src container.
Reduce the size of images in your landing page by 10%.
Use CSS instead of relying on “spacer.gif” or “clear.gif” images to style the look and feel of your landing pages.
Allow caching when possible.
Use external JavaScript and move external JavaScript like analytics code and other to the bottom of your landing pages.