Load times and SEO for 1 page sites

Question

I find that 1 page sites can be interactive animating from page to page. But if a site starts to get a little larger or contains many images, perhaps an image gallery, it loads slowly. Also its not good for SEO I believe? How can I fix these 2 issues?

For the 1st (Slow loading), I am thinking I should somehow load only 1 page at a time, then load in the background other pages. It sounds simple in theory, but what happens if when I am only loading page 2 in background, the user requests for page 6? Or any other suggestions?

Then for SEO, what can I do abt it?

Answer 1

There's a whole discipline that has evolved around page-speed optimization. This has gained additional interest since Google announced that page speed is a factor in ranking. The good thing is that whatever you do to improve you're user's experience/perception of page speed, you'll most likely doing what the search engines appreciate as well.

Gaining an understanding of browser/server caching, reading both Google's and Yahoo's recommendations on optimizing sites for speed will set you in good stead.

Answer 2

from a SEO point of view: forget about it.

only the initial load of a page is important from a SEO perspective. everything that you do after the inital load based on a user interaction is not subject of SEO.

SEO optimizing single page webapps only deals with the initial HTML page (HTML + synchronous dependencies like scripts and images) loaded by a non javascript clients on the first request. everything else is more ux/usability territory.

if you want to preload "pages" into your javascript/ajax app just load them one after the other in an asynchronous way (which is the normal way in ajax). the thing about asynchronous is, that it just does not block the browser.

Answer 3

Css sprites and reduce picture size in KB. Most slow loading sites are pictures. Hosting makes a big difference too.