: Asynchronous page loading and SEO To speed up my website (or at least the time to first byte (TTFB)), I'd like to only send the layout of the page and then get the page content with an

@Sims2060225

There is an easier way to do it. You can cache your HTML as static object and send it from CDN, thus bypassing the rendering process. The idea is similar. This way you can send your HTML as quickly as possible and kick off parsing to improve SEO (and UX).

Note that browsers will - by default - start parsing as soon as HTML arrives so you don't need to split your content and layout, they will do it themselves: rendering the page over time, as more and more object arrive.

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@Pierce454

The most important thing for search engines is your content, so don't make it complicated to get.

The developer extension of browser will give you so much hints about what really slows down things I would start there. Take a look, for example, at this screenshot from the Audit tab of the Chrome Developer Tools:



And these are just some hints you get for free. You can also dive into what time it takes for rendering the content, the memory usage, latency and more (One of many introductions to the DevTools on YouTube).

Caching your computed content in the usual sense ("creating a static html file") will almost always be the #1 effective starting point. From there you can gzip content (via your webserver or proxy), compress your JS and CSS files, remove not needed webfont styles (e.g. extra-bold 800 if you don't use it), load static files from a different (and cookieless) domain and much much more.

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@Frith620

Unfortunately, if Google knew intentions SEO would be much easier :) What you are attempting to do, regardless of intention, is the same as someone with a bad intention would do, at least according to Google.

I would do exactly the opposite. Send the content with minimal layout the usual synchronous way and load media asynchronously. You may notice that Bing does that. You can search before the images arrive.

You may also delay-load non-core content which is not needed by the Google crawler. You have to decide based on your site but things like areas with random news or renderings from another part of the site, etc.

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