Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Website Speed and Admin Pages
If you have been monitoring your website’s load speed under Webmaster Tools you may well have seen that the slowest page is your admin or login pages. However these pages are not relevant to normal visitors if this admin page is simply for you to edit the website content. As the times for loading these pages can be quite high we justifiably are concerned that having the load time for admin pages included in the calculation for load speed will adversely affect our performance in search results following Google’s announcement that website load speed will become increasingly important. Naturally I assumed that Google would be excluding these pages from their calculation however not so! I found a recent thread in the Webmaster Central Forum where a Google employee confirmed that even if you have excluded pages using your robots.txt file, it will still be included in the page speed assessment. This really is not fair as these pages have no impact on the visitors viewing experience and so websites with admin login for editing should not be penalised in this way. See below the answer given;
12/22/09
Is there any way to exclude part of the website being counted toward stats in the Site Performance?
I have a self-hosted Wordpress blog and it appears what the admin section of my blog is the slowest part of the website (9 of 10 pages in “Example pages” are related to Admin section), however I am the only person who loads those pages.
I am very interested to know the stats for the rest of the website, which my visitors are exposed to.
Is there any way to exclude Admin part stats being counted towards the Site Performance?A Google Employee on 12/23/09
Susan Moskwa (Google Employee)
Paraphrasing a response from another thread: “Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to exclude them from the display at the moment. In the future, we might consider removing roboted-out URLs, so if you robot the admin pages out (in addition to password protecting them), that will be the correct and sufficient.”
