A little while ago we blogged about site load speed becoming a ranking factor in Google and something you should be considering when working on your SEO and I thought I’d follow up on this with some notes about ViewState code on pages of your website.
ViewState code is created in ASP.net pages and can create strings of code which are very long in some cases. This code can create slower page load speeds and can also create pages larger than the 100k file size limit that Google appears to have. The longer the ViewState code on your website the larger the file which will need to be loaded and the slower your site speed.
To see if you have an issue with ViewState code on your site you have two options. Firstly you could look at the source code of the page in question. If there is a large amount of ViewState code on the page you will spot this immediately as in some cases I’ve seen some HTML code which is over half ViewState code. If you can see more than about 10 lines of ViewState code in the source code you’ve probably got an issue.
The second option you have is to use the Google Webmaster Tools Fetch as Googlebot functionality which will show you if the page is not being read fully by the Google crawlers.
If you have checked the code on your website using one of the above methods and found ViewState code in the HTML then you should be discussing options for removing or reducing ViewState code with your developer.
The best recommendation in this instance is turning off ViewState code all together as this will remove all of the code on the page. However if this is not possible you should look into compressing the ViewState code or turning off some of the functionality within ViewState as there are probably some elements of the code which are not being used on your site which are still creating code.
As we mentioned in the last blog about site speed there are other items which can be used to help page load speed, including externalising CSS code into one file and doing the same with JavaScript code as well as implementing Gzip compression of files.
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