What is the impact of excessive code on rankings

[AmyLB]

I am working on optimizing a page that utilizes a template that generates an excessive amount of code - 4 to 5 times what I am seeing with competitor pages. The entire site seems to have this problem and we have, according to webmaster tools a a medium to slow load time.

In general, given the content and teh strength of the domain, I think this page should be performing better. I think the  entire site should be performing better. Would it be worth it to replace the template I am using and replace it with a more lightweight page design? I would obviously keep the content and the url the same.

Typically I want to try everything I can to improve rankings, but this change would take some time, so I don;t want to rush into it.

Looking for some answers based on experience, not general best practices. Thanks

[CleverPhD]

Page speed is a factor in rankings.   You have to have it as a systematic part of how your developer thinks and how the rest of your team thinks when setting up features.  Easier said that done, but worth the long term effort.

The adage, "when you measure it, you can improve it" is key with developers. Either let them see the GWT numbers or setup something like New Relic reporting or some other tool.

The page speed on one of our sites was increasing and then I was also noticing some 500 errors in GWT.  I had our IT guy drill down and figure it out.  It was a caching issue that each time a page loaded, a full database query would run vs running off the cache.   Sometimes it would be enough that a page would not load.  It was intermittent.   He fixed it and look at how our page speed improved (see attached).

This was in the last part of May, first part of June.  We had a great July (despite a slow first week with the holiday) due to improvements in organic ranking.  Our improvement in speed was a part of this.

One more on this.  I find the GWT Labs Speed tool can suck.  It does not seem to sample very many pages.  Also, in one site we had,  it focused on the site search page and of course that is slower than the rest of the site so it was inflated.  I like the Health Crawl Stats (that is where the screen shot is from).  Then I can use other tools to test on a page by page basis.

Cheers.

lWnOR

[AmyLB]

Thanks...would you say this page has too much code?

http://www.dana-farber.org/Adult-Care/Treatment-and-Support/Treatment-Centers-and-Clinical-Services/Stem-Cell-Transplantation-Program.aspx