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Optimize ASP.Net Pages By Reducing The Size Of The Viewstate To Rank Higher On Search Engines
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Manoj Mansukhani July 19, 2006
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Manoj Mansukhani |
Manoj Mansukhani is the founder and CEO of Scarlet Technologies (http://www.scarlettech.com).
They provide services to help business get setup and succeed online.
Their services include online marketing, search engine optimization,
increasing website conversion rates and web development. Visit the
website to find out how you can succeed online.
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Manoj Mansukhani
has written 1 articles for WebKnowHow. |
View all articles by Manoj Mansukhani... |
One way to optimize the pages you develop with ASP.NET is to keep a
check on the view state of the page and the controls that are added to
the page. Any seasoned developer of ASP.NET will remember the VIEWSTATE
which is added to every page in a hidden field _VIEWSTATE and contains
base64 encoded data which could be any where from 800 to tens of
thousands of characters long depending on your usage of this property
on your page.
There are many issues with view state in ASP.NET
1.x. It is on by default, and unless you know to look for it and
disable it when it is not needed, it can significantly increase the
amount of data rendered by your page. This becomes particularly painful
when you use data-bound controls, all of which use view state to save
their state across post backs.
You need to ensure that you only
use the VIEWSTATE property for the page and controls where necessary so
that the size of the value for the hidden field of _VIEWSTATE is
minimum. This will ensure that your page loads fast and that the search
engines can retrieve the actual content of your page.
Some
search engines only read a certain set of characters from the top
(that's why you have most SEO specialists mentioning that you should
have your keywords on the top of the page) and the bottom of the page.
If the value of the hidden field of _VIEWSTATE is long on your page
then these search engines would not be able to get to the actual
content of your page as a result it would never map the keywords
(keywords density) and you would have a low ranking on these search
engines.
How to decrease the size of the view state?
a.
As mentioned before the VIEWSTATE for any page is set to TRUE by
default. If you do not require the controls or the page to hold the
VIEWSTATE you can disable the VIEWSTATE for the page completely by
adding the directive to the page. (Usually if you have a page that does
not post back to itself you can disable the VIEWSTATE on these pages.)
b.
You can selectively disable the VIEWSTATE of the controls, datagrids
etc that you use on the page if these controls do not post back to the
same page.
You will see a considerable difference in the page
size and the loading time of the page once you disable the VIEWSTATE of
the controls or the page. This will also be evident from the size of
the base64-encoded string in the value field of the hidden field of
_VIEWSTATE. By disabling the VIEWSTATE for a couple of datagrid
controls on one of the pages of our clients website, we were able to
reduce the VIEWSTATE of the page from 10,000 characters to 1000
characters and the page size also reduced by a few kilobytes (KB). |
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