Fibre Marketing

Category: Speed

Why Low Speed Scores Could Be Killing Your Traffic

Posted on by Chloe

Earlier this month, Google rolled out its new speed reports on the Google Search Console to the general public. This aims to identify webpages that are slow to load and provide advice on how to improve the website’s performance.

Use this new feature and you could potentially boost your website rankings and improve user experience, allowing you to stand out from the competition and get the business results you need.

Keep reading to learn why your website speed matters, how the new Google speed reports can provide useful insight and learn more on how you can improve your website speed.

Why does site speed matter?

Site speed matters because it can potentially make or break user experience and influence your Google rankings.

Since the Google Speed update in 2018, speed has been one of the direct ranking factors used by the search algorithms to rank your pages and is used for both mobile and desktop sites. If your website is slow to load, the search engines could crawl fewer pages and your rankings are likely to suffer as a result.

Unsurprisingly, slow load speeds also affect the overall user experience. When a website visitor has to wait longer than they expect for a page to load, they’re more likely to click away from your page and choose your competition instead.

According to an article titled “Why Performance Matters” on the Google developer guide, “The BBC found they lost an additional 10% of users for every additional second their site took to load.” This can result in a higher bounce rate and a lower than average time spent on the page which damages the reputation of your brand and negatively impact your conversions.

Clearly, for both SEO and user experience, we need to keep website load speed in mind and troubleshoot any issues we come across. But how do you know how your website is performing?

Enter Google Search Console speed reports.

Using the Google Search Console speed report

Google Search Console speed reports were officially released this months after several months of testing.

Available in the Google Search Console interface under the ‘enhancements’ tab, users can quickly test the speed of the sections and URLs on their websites and identify any potential problems.

The results divided between ‘fast’, ‘moderate’ and ‘slow,’ for both mobile and desktop sites and colour-coded for ease of reference.

Google also provide useful tips on how you can overcome any problematic pages and increase your page load speed. Once you make these changes, you can continue to track your performance and make changes until your website performs as well as possible.

How to increase your website speed

If you identify a problem with one or several of your webpages, don’t panic.

There are many ways you can boost the speed of your website. Here are some tips:

Compress your images

By decreasing the file size of your images and choosing the right file format, you can speed up your website load time significantly.

While we do need crisp, compelling images to drive conversion, according to HTTP Archive, they can take up around 21% of the weight of the entire webpage. They also tend to be resource-heavy, impact user experience and slow down the page load speed considerably.

There are many tools, programmes plugins and scripts that can help you to achieve this relatively seamlessly.

The most popular of these is Affinity Photo as it is free and works in a similar way to Adobe Photoshop. Gimp is another programme which can help you achieve the same. You might prefer to use an online tool such as JPEG Mini or ImageResizer.com.

When you compress your images they will naturally lose quality so it’s important to find the balance between file size and quality. Experiment to find what works best for your website.

It’s also important to save images in the right format. Generally speaking, it’s better to choose JPEG for larger images as these have more flexibility with resizing and compression, WebP for smaller images and SVG for logos and icons as this format is vector-based.

Minify CSS, JavaScript and HTML

Cleaning up your website code and removing any unnecessary characters, spaces, commas, comments, formatting and unused code, you can significantly boost your website speed and improve both UX and your search rankings.

Although these tiny pieces of unwanted code might not seem like much, they can slow down the time it takes to load your website and increase the crawl time needed by the Google bots to do their job.

Ask your web developer to do this of use one of the minifying resources recommended by Google such as HTML Minifier, CSSNana and UglifyJS.

Reduce redirects

Redirects are more than just annoying. They force your website visitor and Google to wait longer before they can access the information they are looking for.

Start fixing the problem by first identifying where you have redirects on your website. Tools such as Redirect Mapper can be excellent tools to help. Once you’ve found them, ask yourself why it exists and see how it affects the rest of your site. If it’s not essential, remove it where possible.

Use browser caching

When a user accesses information on a website, certain information such as images and stylesheets are stored on their browser. This allows them to be accessed quickly next time they visit.

You can leverage this process by telling browsers what they should do with the various information on your website.

There are several ways that this can be done by asking your developer to add code directly to your website or select a plugin that will handle the process for you. For WordPress, W3 Total Cache and WP Rocket are excellent choices.

Boost server response time

Provide faster results to your website visitors by improving your server response time.

Ensure that you’re using the best host and server that can meet the unique needs of your business. It should provide enough resources, provide excellent customisation option and give you fast results. Also, configure the settings to use HTTP2 and enable the cache so your website loads faster.

Use a content distribution network

Content distribution networks (CDNs) allow your website content to be accessed more quickly to users who are geographically closer to your servers. For example, if you’re a website visitor in Bristol, you’ll access the website on a London-based CDN much quicker than someone based in Sydney, Australia.

They can also provide a range of benefits including improving site accessibility, reducing website downtime, compressing images and delivering a more stable website to your visitors. Ask a professional if you’d like to do this for your business.

A slow website is more than just a minor annoyance. It directly affects SEO and user experience, increases bounce rate, reduces conversions and harms your brand image. Use the new Google Search Console speed reports and you can identify any issues, find a solution and boost your flow of website traffic again.

Website speeds and the effect on organic rankings

Posted on by Fibre Agency

 

In the world of Google, things are ever changing- and one of the latest changes is adding to the way the search engine prioritises and ranks results on their website.

SEO can seem complicated- and now Google are going to include Website Speed and Mobile-First Indexing into their Optimising system.

 

Why?

Our desire for online speed has been met by Google in their quest to make pages ‘appear’ much faster for us. Where we want efficiency and easiness, Google will be matching our wants by boosting faster pages up the search rankings- and lowering slower or longer-loading pages.

 

When?

There is time for developers to improve their web speed: the update won’t take place until July 2018. However, this will be a world-wide change and so website owners should be wary that- if they’re not joining in- competitors across the globe might well be…

But don’t jump to panicking just yet! This does not mean that Google will down-play the rest of your SEO efforts. Slower sites that have high quality and relevant content will still rise above websites containing poor content.

 

What about the Mobile-First Indexing?

An impressive 55% of internet traffic comes from searches completed on mobile devices. In the past, Google ranked websites using Desktop information. However, after a study completed by Stone Temple Consulting, a clear shift showed the preferred method for searches is using mobile devices. Inevitably, the search engine now ranks sites according to Mobile traffic instead.

 

How will this affect my site?

It’s the question we all want answered- but- to keep things straightforward for the time being, webpages with matching content on both Desktop and Mobile will likely keep their SEO rating as is (unless they’re both slow.) However, if your Mobile site has less content available (and is of a poorer quality,) you might notice a negative turn for your rankings. The answer then, for the immediate time, is to invest in making your Mobile experience as excellent as it can be.

 

Google are being quite vague and saying that the rankings will switch once results are “quality neutral.” This means they will wait for websites to adapt before implementing drastic SEO structures. If they were to make the changes immediately, many people would be rather uncomfortable with the idea. However, by outlining that these changes will be made later in the year, you at least have the chance to optimise your mobile website and- quite literally- get up to speed!

 

How do I do this?

Firstly, ensure your content shows up on all devices. If you have a website, this will affect you and potentially where you are found on Google search engine, so you need to check how your website is functioning, especially on those mobile devices! Also, check out Google’s Webmaster Central Blog and bookmark it so you can read first-hand of any updates. If your business relies on good internet traffic, then read this article: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/11/mobile-first-indexing.html

 

Do I panic… now?

Still, no. Google provide resources to help you get this sorted. They’re not expecting all web-owners to have a team of developers behind them to help keep them updated! Instead, they are making tools available for you to be able to track your progress. In terms of speed, we are all able to access their ‘Speed Scorecard,’ whereby you enter a domain, press the search button, and it will tell you the length of time it takes to load the home page. In fact, why not check yours out now? Use this link to reach the feature: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/mobile/

 

Understanding the Speed Scorecard

Helpfully, Google provide an ‘Impact Calculator,’ included as part of the Speed Scorecard. Through this, you’re able to work out any financial losses as it compares your rankings to competitors. We all know that internet traffic equates to revenue, with more hits come more impressions; with more leads comes more sales! It really is time to make responsiveness and speed a priority at present!

 

How Does This Look?

Let’s say you host a news site and, for example, you produce a brilliant article about the Oscars. A rival site sees it and produces a really similar piece with the same number of keywords as yours. They post it to their website- but they have the speedier page- so they will rank higher up the search engine results than you!

 

What should you do about it?

Well, all you can do is keep updating and improving your site to maximise your own SEO rating- and meeting Google’s latest speed demands. Clear up the ‘clutter’ on your site, for starters. Concise content is best (cut lengthy pages of text) and reduce the number of high-res images you have, as these take a long time to load. Servers, hosting and other factors do play a part, too, but by making sure your mobile view is quick and clutter-free, will lead you in good stead!

 

WordPress Users

WordPress is a dominant force when it comes to web-hosting, and Google have paired up with them- creating nothing short of an ‘Internet Super-Power!’ Over 28% of all global websites are WordPress hosted- and 50,000 more sites are added daily. Therefore, what Google want to achieve is help accelerate the development of WordPress, in somewhat of a win-win scenario for both parties.

 

How?

WordPress has soared to its success and secured its large portion of the tech world. Despite this, its coding has not quite ‘caught up.’ Mix that amongst many security and performance updates, alongside users applying complex plugins and heavy content, individual website speeds plummet. This is totally not ideal when ‘53% of [internet] users abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.’ Google, secure in the knowledge that they have the power to do something about it, are getting involved! Therefore, expect to see much quicker website loading times and increased functionality from a large proportion of the world’s web using WordPress. You can read more about this, here: https://www.fibremarketing.co.uk/google-teams-wordpress-speed-web/

 

Wonders for Your WordPress

Of course, this partnership creates somewhat of an elite status for WordPress. This basically guarantees them market-domination in future. In addition to the support and input from Google, it seems likely that websites hosted with WordPress will be prioritised when it comes to the search engine rankings. If you’re with WordPress- and you’re clued up when it comes to these SEO switches- then you’re in a very secure place to keep moving up the rankings, for many years to come!

Google teams up with WordPress to speed up the web!

Posted on by Fibre Agency

This week, in the next step of Google taking on speeding up mobile internet, saw Google announce the beginning of a new partnership with WordPress. But why is it such a big deal? Should we have seen it coming?

Over the past few years we’ve seen Google turn their attention to page speed for mobile users. Take a quick look around you and it’s easy to see why. We use mobiles for general browsing more than ever. You may even be reading this on a phone right now. Unsurprisingly, total browse time for mobile users has even surpassed that of desktop users, and is projected to continue growing by 6% per year.

And yet – many websites still aren’t accessible for mobile users. Sites optimised for desktop, or even those adjusted for mobile view, are typically large and slow to load when not accessed via WiFi. For example, even over a 3G connection average mobile loading speed is 19 seconds. This may not sound like long but over 53% of users abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. For online businesses, this is a massive loss. But for Google it’s a huge opportunity to access a large, growing and poorly tapped market.

Google’s biggest effort over the past few years is Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP. This technology aims to optimise sites for mobile access by improving loading time. AMP primarily achieves this by banning bandwidth heavy JavaScript in favour of a narrow set of web technologies and hosting via dedicated AMP servers, among many other processes. And, it’s successful: AMP sites have been shown to load up to 85% faster on 3G than non-AMP sites. As expected, since its release in February 2016, AMP users have steadily increased, this has been incredibly successful in increasing mobile traffic and has been shown to be associated with a 20% increase in sales.

To improve mobile access, Google already gives priority positions to sites that utilise AMP (keep an eye out for the grey lightening symbol!). And at some point in 2018, mobile page speed will begin to be incorporated into Google’s ranking factor for websites.

Which is where we get to WordPress. Like mobile customers being an untapped market, it seems that the same can be said for WordPress. Currently, WordPress have almost 60% of the market share and about 1/3 of all – all – published content online utilises WordPress CMS (content management system). Despite its size and popularity, WordPress is often found by users to be slow and buggy. In WordCamp US 2017 – one of the biggest events in the WordPress calendar – Google presented a complete overview of WordPress ecosystem performance metrics. And it was a sad picture. Among some circles it even has a reputation for being less secure but there’s not a lot of evidence for this notion. Yet, if Google can turn their attention to improving the web experience for WordPress users, they have the potential to reach a massive part of the market and potentially help it to grow.

So yes, maybe we should have seen it coming.

It’s thought that Google’s interest in WordPress isn’t just about speed though. It’s about pushing Progressive Web Apps (PWA) or the ‘’appification’’ of the web. Like AMP, this technology incorporates app like features such as push-notifications, security features and identity management, among others. It aims to standardize user experience across different websites by making them fast, app-like and consistent across all platforms. Yet, PWA is still in the early days and needs a lot of work. Right now, PWA have been poorly deployed effectively, perhaps because they are code heavy and difficult to develop. Yet with WordPress 4.5 release, working PWA simply into the core code looks like a realistic possibility. And for Google, working in tandem with WordPress allows them to roll out Progressive Web Apps as well as AMP to up to a 1/3 of online content.

To kick-start their partnership with WordPress, Alberto Medina, a developer working for the Web Content Ecosystems team at Google, announced on his blog last week that Google will be expanding their team to include a core group of WordPress experts who will work on generating PWA plugins for WordPress while simultaneously working with Google to improve speed, performance and (most likely) AMP compatibility.