Speed forces

More searches are now performed on mobile compared to desktop and m-commerce grew three times faster than ecommerce in 2015. Even aside from purchases made on the devices themselves, mobile is also having a tremendous impact on in-store purchases. According to Deloitte, mobile has an impact of $970 billion on offline purchases. These changes force brands to have a mindset shift. Instead of just being mobile-compatible, they need to be mobile-optimized. Sites need to think specifically about what mobile customers want to see and create sites and online experiences that are tailored to them. One of the most important factors in the mobile experience is speed. About 40% of visitors will abandon a site if it does not load in 3 seconds. This means that companies are potentially experiencing massive losses in traffic and revenue if their sites do not meet the needs of customers. Google’s solution to this problem has been the launch of AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages. What is AMP? … [Read more...] about Google Accelerated Mobile Pages and content: the need for speed

At the recent SMX East conference in New York, I sat in on a session presented by Fili Wiese, titled, “The Need for Speed.” Wiese is a former member of Google’s search quality team who also worked as a clickspam engineer. In this session, he presented a lot of great technical data, as well as information on ways to improve site performance. One of the articles Wiese referenced was “Page Load Times vs. Conversion Rates,” and the data contained in that article is truly compelling: If that isn’t motivation enough, Google has said that they plan to make page speed a direct ranking factor on mobile devices. You may ask how big a factor it might become, but I do think that speed matters a lot to mobile users, so there is reason to believe that this is a ranking factor that will have some weight to it. Bigger than content quality and links? Don’t be silly. But still, it’s a signal that could have some impact. The great majority of sites have … [Read more...] about Satisfying The Need For Speed

Almost three years ago, Google announced that it had begun factoring site speed into their ranking algorithm. Since then, SEOs have debated how significant an effect page speed has on actual search engine rankings. While Google may be using it as a signal, it’s clearly not an overwhelming signal. Still, regardless of the algorithmic weight page speed has on rankings, we do know that it has a significant impact on site conversions. Every second visitors have to wait for a page to load is a proven loss in sales! In a recent post titled, Why You Won’t Crush It This Year, Bryan Eisenberg wrote: “It seems clear that trying to increase sales by driving more traffic to a site with a terrible customer conversion rate is like trying to keep a leaky bucket (your sales funnel) full by adding more water instead of plugging the holes.” It’s a good point, and one that I’ve made more than once before. Bottom line: optimizing your website for rankings is great, … [Read more...] about How To Lose Wait On Your Website By Increasing Page Load Speeds

There are lots of different ways to speed up searching. Google, Bing and Yahoo all offer browser toolbars — no need to visit their home pages, just search wherever you are. Google and Yahoo both have their own versions of “instant search,” where search results appear as you type. Google’s Chrome web browser lets you search right from the browser address bar. And they all fall short of my new favorite search tool: Slashtag.it. If you’re really looking to search faster, this is the way to do it. Slashtag.it isn’t a search engine; it’s an interface that lets you access several dozen search engines more quickly. It does this via simple slashtag commands – one for each of a couple dozen different search sites. (You might think Blekko coined the term “slashtag,” but the term was actually first used in relation to Twitter in late 2009.) If you wanted to search for U2, for example, across several different sites, there’s no need … [Read more...] about This Is What Google, Bing & Yahoo Should’ve Done To Speed Up Search

Frankly, I’m stunned how often web teams resist doing it. Here’s a list from easy to not-so-easy, of 29 ways you can get things running faster on your website: Put your images on a separate domain. Services like Amazon S3 make this very easy. Open an S3 account. Point a subdomain like ‘blah.yoursite.com’ at the S3 storage. Put your images there. Web browsers can load from multiple domains simultaneously, creating the impression that your site is faster. Plus, you’ll use less of your own server’s bandwidth and CPU. Every little bit helps. Or, just put your images on Flickr and use them as your separate domain. Compress images using the right file type. Use ‘lossy’ compression—JPEG—for photos and images with lots of colors. Use ‘lossless’ compression—PNG and GIF—for line art and images with only a few colors. Resize images before you upload them. Don’t resize images using height and width! Resize … [Read more...] about 29 Ways To Speed Up Your Website