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Apr 122010

Improving Site Speed – Talk About The Business Benefit

SEO, page load performance, page speed, site architecture Comments Off

For many months now, webmasters have been responding to signals from Google that page speed would soon become a ranking factor. Very recently, Google confirmed that for a limited set of queries, Google.com (US) results are influenced by page load times (around 1% of queries). Although you shouldn’t panic about this announcement, it may be wise to be prepared for a wider implementation of the change across Google’s search results.

lancia hf integrale

Photo credit: Ed Callow

Thing is, if you haven’t been optimising your site performance for improved speed until now, you may have missed a trick (or a conversion, email registration, repeat visit or some other valuable metric).

The business impact of performance changes to a site

At Velocity 09, Eric Schurman and Jake Brutlag presented “Performance Related Changes and their User Impact”. Their presentation was based on groups of site performance experiments carried out at Google and Microsoft. Microsoft introduced delays on their servers and slowed down the delivery of their search results, slowing page load or testing progressive rendering on their pages. Their objective was to collect data to help the organisations decide how important page load performance actually was to a business driven outcome.

If you don’t have time to review this (excellent) video, let me summarise a few important points:

Microsoft concluded that server side delays above around 200ms introduced strong negative impacts on the following metrics:

Repeat usage
Revenue (A revenue drop per user as much as 4%)
User engagement
Customer satisfaction
Time to first click (as much as twice as long compared to the delay introduced)

It was extremely fascinating to learn that one of Google’s methodologies to introduce a lag in their search results was as simple as setting a delay to respond to the very first server header request received from the user. Google were also able to respond with a server header response before they’d actually generated the search results themselves and test variations of ads rendered before organic results and vice versa.

Google similarly concluded that a linear relationship exists between increasing server side delays and user satisfaction metrics, abandonment and declining repeat searches.

What things can we do to improve our page load times?

If you’re lucky enough to have the development skills nessecary to implement performance changes on your site, then you might want to review Google’s recommendations for site performance tools or read this post on improving your site speed written last year on SEOgadget.

I have no direct control over my site performance

You might have no direct control over your website’s page load times. Most SEO’s don’t directly influence the site technology platform, hosting solution, content delivery network choice or proxy caching solution for their (large scale) site infrastructures, but that’s not to say they can’t offer advice, share research or evangelise in their organisation.

14% will start shopping at a different site if page loads are slow, 23% will stop shopping or even walk away from their computer.

Spread the word

Make your technology team aware of the Google announcements and draw their attention to the tools made available in the labs section of Google Webmaster tools. Fact is, most tech teams have superior site monitoring capabilities to Google’s labs based performance tools but introducing the idea that site performance can impact SEO and user engagement is a great way to capture interest. A presentation, an email or a face to face conversation can really help. In my last in-house SEO role, I would get together with the technology team to discuss SEO on a monthly basis and they were always really interested in what developments were happening in the SEO community. New issues in the SEO community, in particular, got them interested!

Distribute research available that suggests the relationship between site performance and user engagement metrics. The video embedded in this post can be found here and the presentation on Scribd, here. Data is very difficult to come by (and I suspect the outcome of this type of work will depend very much on the market, keyword, page layout / design) but experiments on page weight were being carried out a long time before Google began their performance campaign – so it must be pretty important, right? Facebook published a summary of the impact of page load on user engagement on August 28^th 2009, concluding that metrics such as page views per session improved as server response time and page load times were reduced.

This excellent study on Royal Pingdom (found via SEOmoz) concluded that user expectations on site performance have changed significantly since 2006, stating:

47% expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.
52% of online shoppers claim that quick page loads are important for their loyalty to a site.
14% will start shopping at a different site if page loads are slow, 23% will stop shopping or even walk away from their computer.
64% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with their site visit will go somewhere else to shop next time.

That’s amazing! Improving or resolving these factors could yield how much % increase in ROI for your business?

You could also suggest alternatives to big hosting upgrades, such as the implementation of a remote proxy cache that serves content in the geolocation you’re actually targeting.

Google’s announcement really brings a much older conversation back into play – what are the business benefits of implementing a faster, more efficient website? Suddenly a mysterious and highly difficult to predict potential ROI from 1% of US searches becomes measurable and highly actionable, with potential for a big impact on ROI.Similar Posts:

View the full post: Improving Site Speed – Talk About The Business Benefit or read more at SEOgadget.co.uk

Nov 232009

Tools to Speed Up Your Site – Ready for 2010

SEO Tools, page load performance, page speed, site architecture Comments Off

Matt Cutts recently referred to a movement inside Google to begin using page load times as part of the organic ranking algorithm, describing the factor as one of his ‘what to expect in 2010′ bullet points in a presentation at PubCon Vegas 2009.

Two cars driving in a 60 mph speed limit
Photo by: lrargerich

Most webmasters and SEO’s have seen this as a positive change, and Google have already started doing a lot to support webmasters in their quest to pursue a faster, more efficient website. They’ve even begun developing a new protocol, “SPDY” to improve upon the “HTTP” protocol to create a “2x Faster Web”. Google’s make the web faster project provides background reading and resources as part of their mission to “improving the web for all“.

I’ve picked out some useful tools that you can use to start improving your client’s site performance now. Does it make sense to start including recommendations related to serious site performance issues in your SEO consulting from now on? I think it does.

Pingdom tools – full page test

The Pingdom “Full Page Test” loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScript, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser, reporting on total loading time, the number of objects on the page and the results can be sorted by useful metrics such as load order, load time and file size.

The tool is particularly useful for identifying slow loading internal objects or external scripts through the “order by” functionality, though the tool itself does not provide a commentary and recommendations on potential performance issues.

Google page speed

On the tool, Google writes:

Page Speed performs several tests on a site’s web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who run Page Speed on their pages get a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance.

Google’s plugin integrates nicely with Firebug, the code preview plugin, standard in all Firefox SEO setups and seems a lot more reliable than the earlier versions. It’s strength (Over Y!Slow) is that the recommendations made in the speed test sometimes contain actual examples. For example, if you’re told to minify your CSS, Page Speed will provide you with an example of your own CSS file in its minified form.

page speed recommendations to minify CSS

WebPagetest.org

Based on the Internet Explorer specific, AOL developed tool Pagetest, the online version offers the ability to choose test location (US, UK and New Zealand), Browser (IE7 or IE8), and more advanced settings such as repeat testing for more reliable data. Matt Cutts mentioned this tool in an interview with Mike McDonald at Pubcon 2009.

The test is surprisingly powerful (don’t be put off by old school UI design) with an optimization check list and waterfall report, similar to Pingdom’s tools. The downside of the UI experience is an inability to sort by performance metrics – all of the reports are generated as images, not ideal for deep data analysis.

WGET

If you’re careful to get the arguments right in the command line, WGET can provide a useful breakdown of page load times as the crawler fetches and stores web pages on your computer. Normally WGET is for Linux users, though I wrote a how to install WGET in Windows guide for the Vista / XP / Win7 crowd. If you’re interested, definitely have a go.

WebSiteOptimiser.com

page objects report

WebSiteOptimiser produces a basic, but useful page objects report with a particular focus on bandwidth saving through the use of compression. The report also makes comments and gives warnings on image size, scripts and CSS. Very handy, though bypassing the CAPTCHA to get to the report was an unwelcome step in the process.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google webmaster tools site speed chart

Don’t forget Google’s Webmaster tools – though extremely basic, the crawl stats section can give you a directional feel for the overall performance of your website. In the example from SEOgadget above, you’ll see a sharp decrease in time spent downloading a page in mid October. That was due to a site redesign and relaunch, where a lot of inefficient code was replaced with something much more nicely put together. If anything, it just goes to show that a site update with a good developemnt team can usually provide performance improvements without having to do anything to the server or hosting!

It’s great that Google are actively involved with research and tools that can deliver a faster web. I do hope though, that Webmaster Tools gets an upgrade in the site monitoring department before any page speed related upgrades are included in the ranking algorithm. In the meantime, there are already plenty of tools (and good developers) that can help you with your site performance issues.Similar Posts:

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Tools to Speed Up Your Site – Ready for 2010

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