| 19 August |
Cleaning up Code White Space |
Optimally, HTML code should not contain excessive white space so that it can be more easily crawled by search engine bots.
Not concerned about the bots getting through your code?
What about page load time?
Even though those spaces look empty, they take up space and add to the overall size of a web page.
For example, I just measured the code site of a page that contains excess white space. The code alone measures 108 KB. With proper code formatting, I was able to reduce the size down to 75 KB. That’s a whopping 33 KB in excess code white space!
Imagine the decreased page load time and increased site performance.
Are you paying for server bandwidth? Imagine reducing your bandwidth by 33 KB, multiplied by your average page views and then multiplying by the average visitor count per month. It all adds up.
Besides the site performance issues mentioned above, I’m a believer that page load time is a factor in search rankings.
What can you do about it?
If you’re hand coding your site, just clean up your code.
If your site is dynamic, clean up your code and try a couple of the following solutions:
The first solution is dependent on your server using Apache Tomcat 5.5 or higher.
http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=38852
The second solution is based on using Java Servlet 2.4.