Will One Line Of Code Help Your SEO?

There's been quite a lot of discussion online (and a little offline) about a recent blog article called: How I Sped Up My Site 68.35% With One Line of Code

I think the biggest buzz about this article has been in the SEO community, who suddenly got all excited about a magical way to speed up web pages. Mentioned by Moz (the organic optimisation industry's catnip) you could be fooled into thinking that one person had suddenly found a way to massively boost a site to the top of the results pages.
Note: For those who don't know, the speed a page downloads is cited as one of the numerous factors taken into consideration when search engines such as Google rank (judge) your site... having a much faster page load speed with just one little line of code would be fabulous.
But alas, that's not the case.

You see, I think this article is misleading as it explains how to use an HTML tag called "rel-prerender".

For those who don't know, the rel-prerender tag is used on a website to place into computer memory the next page the site developer expects the users to click on. For example, Google sometimes use it in their search engine results pages (SERPs) to make the experience of clicking on the first result much quicker.

To explain how this works on your own website, let's imagine you are on page 1 and want to automatically call-up page 2 behind the scenes (so that it appears very quickly). You therefore insert the "rel-prerender" tag in page 1 to call up page 2 before it is clicked on.

Where might you use this?
Well you might us it on a login-page (page 1) where the logged-in page (page 2) is usually the next step. You can even use it in an eCommerce site to pre-render the shopping cart I guess.... BTW: DO NOT DO THIS!

But as you would expect, there's a catch. Pre-rendering page 2 is the act of requesting a view of it in advance. So people arriving on page 1 can trigger a page 2 view without ever seeing it and in many cases they won't. This means that in some analytic packages this is recorded as a page impression (not in GA, it's clever like that) and ads on that page may be triggered even when nobody's there to see them. Plus it also adds load onto your servers whenever a page is requested, so don't tell your tech support person you're adding further load onto the system that may never be used.

So does it have an effect on SEO? Well I may be wrong.... but I really can't see how it helps organic site optimisation as you are not speeding up the render of the page you want to appear in the SERPs (Page 1). What you are actually doing is speeding up the potential delivery of the next page (page 2) you expect the user to see.  And that's not SEO, that's a caching strategy.

#blackfridayfail - eCommerce sites struggle under high volumes

So, Black Friday fever really looks to be kicking in, as a number of websites seem to either be having issues or are down entirely.

Argos

As of writing, the multi-channel catalogue-based retailer claims to be "experiencing a very high volume of visitors"

River Island

Apparently failing to cope with the pressure of the pre-Christmas bargain hunters, the fashion retailer seems to be having a few issues delivering a homepage.

Tesco
Although this site is up right now, at certain points late last night the UK's biggest retailer was only able to display a waiting page

UK financial comparison homepages - revisited

Over a year ago I posted an article on the homepage file size differences of several financial comparison websites.

I therefore have revisited this topic and thought it would be good to see what's changed... once again using the Firebug and Google page speed plugins for Firefox.

moneysupermarket.com 
Homepage weight: 384.1K
Number of items: 60
Page Speed Score: 80/100 (Desktop)
Page Speed Score: 65/100 (Mobile)
A decrease in page weight but an increase in the number of items means that the page speed is now very slightly less than it was.

comparethemarket.com
Homepage weight: 468.2k
Number of items: 34
Page Speed Score: 82/100 (Desktop)
Page Speed Score: 76/100 (Mobile)
A slight decrease in page weight and a decrease in the number of items has not had the desired effect on page speed.

confused.com
Homepage weight: 419.9k
Number of items: 38
Page Speed Score: 81/100 (Desktop)
Page Speed Score: 66/100 (Mobile)
A small increase in the homepage weight but with a significant reductions in the number of items on the page has not improved the page speed score

gocompare.com
Homepage weight: 1,100k (1.1Mb)
Number of items: 106 
Page Speed Score: 70/100 (Desktop)
Page Speed Score: 59/100 (Mobile)
An increase in the weight of the page by over 200k coupled with an increase in the number of items gives a significant reduction in page speed score (from 87 to 70 - the greatest difference in this test)

The seven key areas of an eCommerce evaluation

I get asked to evaluate online retailing proposition a fair bit. So I thought I would share the key areas that I typically look at and report on.

User experience:

Quickly assess a site’s reaction from target site users (ideally using video & audio remote assessment tools such as whatusersdo.com)

Conversion rate optimisation:

Carry out an analysis of the potential use of conversion rate optimisation (CRO) tools & techniques, including possible AB & MVT processes and products

Retailing, merchandising & site operations:

Review of Inventory, pricing & fulfilment processes & systems. Then review the current processes for photograph & video asset production, merchandising, content management and offer promotion, as well as any sale, distressed inventory, affiliates, syndication, etc.)

Analytics:

Review of current Google e current digital analytics set-up, including: campaign tracking, eCommerce (e.g. funnel & conversion) metrics, integration with other services (e.g. digital marketing, product recommendations, etc.)

Site health:

Review the code, page loading time, internal linking, redirects and 404 (not-found) pages (note: this could cross over into search engine optimisation territory, so can in theory be done at the same time)

Volume & Performance (V&P):

Carry out an assessment of any projected volume and/or performance figures and (hopefully) a check of an previous testing done. This then leads into a validation of these figures and the subsequent planning of future V&P testing.

Have I missed anything?

Ecommerce sites please prep for Christmas

I have a magical and imaginary crystal ball, so if you run a retail eCommerce site in the Western world ..... let me tell you what I see in your short term future....

....An increase in visitor traffic over the next 6 weeks, culminating in a peak around Christmas time.

So now I've told you what's going to happen, what are you going to do about it? Well, if you're like so many other sites I see, you'll do bugger all about it. Then, should your site start to go slow (or even stop) in the run up to your busiest online trading period ever, you'll remember this blog post. And by then, there will be almost nothing you can do about it.

But right now, with 6 weeks to go, there is still time (just) to do something about it. How much actually depends on a number of factors, including how stable and scalable your eCommerce platform and code actually are. Another will depend upon the flexibility you have with your hosting company. Other factors are much harder to describe without going into a lot of scenarios and assumptions, but suffice to say there's always something you can do to improve the performance of a site, given enough lead time and the right expertise.
Note: If you don't know who who to contact, please drop me a line

In short, dear website owner or manger, please make sure you're ready for what is expected to be the largest eCommerce Christmas ever.

Everything online is crap - fix it!

I'm going to approach things in a slightly new way from now on and the title of this post might just give it away.

If you make the assumption that every single website that is out there in some way needs fixing, then in my opinion you are on the right track.

I've previously stated my friend Tristan's thought that "if your ecommerce site isn't broken, you're not looking hard enough" and my approach is really a development of that.

Every website in some way needs help.

Here's what i mean by that comment. It is either:

1. Not fully compatible with all browsers
(a moving feast of web standards and evolving interpretations by the different browser makers - with Microsoft being the primary but not exclusive culprit over the years)

2. Not optimised for the user
(Even the most applauded websites have some barriers to their target users being able to complete all their tasks with the minimum of barriers. From eCommerce sites that sacrifice the smoothness of the user journey by trying to place more buying options in front of the potential purchaser, through to content sites like newspapers that interrupt the reader flow to insert advertising)
Note: and before you comment.... Yes, I know there's a commercial driver to both of these examples, where the site owner seeks to maximise the revenue from either sales or advertising, but this balance between revenue and user experience needs constant review to keep it in check.

3. Not optimised for speed and scale.
(It's actually pretty amazing, given only a few years ago we had to wait ages for a single image to come down the digital pipe via a chirping modem, that we now have such bloated websites that nobody has taken time to optimise the code, images and other assets. I've often criticised the flabby weights of major brand home pages and this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Only a decade ago I had to make sure my online production team got the most out of every kilobyte downloaded, now pages of over a megabyte are not uncommon. Have we not learnt anything from those days from around a decade ago? Apparently not!)
Note: And these site owners wonder why their beautiful, newly-built and interactive platform goes down as soon as more than a few visitors come and take a look....

4. A bunch of other reasons I've previously gone into.
(From bad error messaging through to sites that decide to just break for no apparent reason..... the world wide web is awash with mediocrity that the people commissioning, building and testing them should be ashamed of).

But that's enough ranting. Just accepting it is all crap is not the answer. "Be the change you want to see" said Ghandi (allegedly) and this is what we must all do online.

If you manage a site and it is crap, fix it! If you use a site and it doesn't do what you expect, complain. If you try to buy stuff online and the site does everything it can to make it difficult to transact, don't buy anything (but do feel free to give feedback on why you didn't).

We owe it to others and ourselves to improve the online user experience wherever and whenever possible. We need to fix things and fix them fast!

Surviving a peak eCommerce Christmas - part 4

For the last few days I've been posting useful things to do on the run-up to peak Christmas online trading and ensuring your website can cope with the demands of your visitors . Here's my final post on the subject (for now):

Speak to the business
Understand the marketing activity planned over the festive period and the dates that they are aiming for most impact. What are their targets compared to last year? Rather than add to your load, they may be able to stagger their campaigns and flatten out demand over a more sustained period.

Have a plan for failure
You may see this as a little defeatist, but I always recommend having something up your sleeve in case the worst does actually happen. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to put an alternative site in-place within minutes and it may even be the case that you actually turn your site off when it comes under unprecedented demand. However the worst experience to give to your users is a very plain “site offline” message. Nothing says ‘go away and don’t come back’ like a server error page. At the very least make sure this page (probably a customer 500 error page) has some useful information such as your telephone customer service number and a list of your stores.

In summary…. There are still a number of actions you can take to try and de-risk the situation. Keeping your site stable over the peak period will then allow you to focus on the functionality and performance improvements in the new year, so that you’re more prepared for future peaks in demand.

Previous postings are here:
Part 3
Part 2
Part 1

Surviving a peak eCommerce Christmas - part 3

To help your company get through what is expected to be the businest online Christmas yet, I'm put together some helpful tips.

Set up your own monitoring
Some hosting companies provide a website monitoring service and others may even report on availability as part of a service level agreement. However I would personally have an alternative monitor that is within my control to provide an agnostic perspective. Although it is possible to build your own, there are a number of services out there that can go beyond a simple ‘ping’ of your homepage to confirm it is there and working. Some of the more developed monitoring services can also: check the availability of specific stock, confirm the whole transaction process is working, as well as checking & recording the response time of key pages. Often it is possible to predict problems before they happen. Websites tend to go slow before they break, so getting an email or SMS alert one evening that things are taking a longer than average time to respond… may be an indication that you’re about to lose your site completely.

Try to stress test before the peak comes
I know it is not always possible at the 11th hour to test an eCommerce site to the peak levels expected of the coming Christmas trade. But actually knowing how your site responds under high volumes has huge benefits regardless of the outcome…If it fails, you know when (and hopefully how it fails)… and knowing is always better than not. It may also give you a good indication of other remedial action you need to take. But if it passes and actually stands up to your anticipated load, you have the confidence to keep trading.

Previous posts on this subject are here:
Surviving Christmas Part 2
Surviving Christmas Part 1

Surviving a peak eCommerce Christmas - part 2

To help you get through peak Christmas trading this year, I'm posting as series of helpful tips.
Here's a couple more:

Optimise your images
eCommerce websites are not just made up of code, they typically include a lot of visual assets as well. Users downloading pages including high quality images and possibly video from your servers at busy times can cripple your hardware and bandwidth, degrading everyone’s experience. Ask yourself “Do I really need that huge photo on the homepage?” and even if the answer is ‘yes’ you should check to see if you can compress it even slightly with no obvious reduction in quality. Remember… compressing images to optimum levels should be part of your regular website publishing process and just because you have a great data connection in the office, don’t always assume your user has one too.

Speak with your hosting company
A lot of website availability issues occur when systems are subjected to unpredicted demand. You should already have some idea what your busiest day and hour figures are and when in the next few weeks this could be (if you also do your analysis right, you should also have a good idea of your peak visitors and transactions – see point 1). If you haven’t already, talk to your hosting company and share this information with them. Ask them what they can do to maintain site availability and what monitoring / alerting they have in place. Also discuss with them the possibility of temporarily boosting your bandwidth to higher levels should you need to.

The previous post is here:
http://press20.blogspot.com/2011/11/surviving-peak-ecommerce-christmas.html

Retail website homepage weights – why are they so bloated?

I have been working on client eCommerce sites recently and noticed that some competitive ones were very slow to download. Assuming my Internet connection was the problem I looked to stop any other online services that might be running (e.g. Skype, downloads, etc.)… Only to find I didn’t have anything else downloading.

So I loaded-up Firebug (a brilliant and free debugging tool that plugs into Firefox) and checked the size of the homepages I was looking at.

Here’s what I found:

Site: http://www.johnlewis.com/
Total file size: 573k
Onload time*: 7.55s

Site: http://www.marksandspencer.com/
Total file size: 1.5Mb
Onload time*: 13.63s

Site: http://www.hsamuel.co.uk/
Total file size: 1.3Mb
Onload time*: 16.28s

Site: http://www.debenhams.com/
Total file size: 1.1Mb
Onload time*: 8.16s

Site: http://www.goldsmiths.co.uk/
Total file size: 1.1Mb
Onload time*: 7.44s

Site: http://www.bhs.co.uk/
Total file size: 720kb
Onload time*: 7.39s

Site: http://www.morrisons.co.uk/
Total file size: 1.1Mb
Onload time*: 7.22s

Site: http://asda.co.uk/
Total file size: 866k
Onload time*: 9.33s

Note: This isn’t an exactly scientific test, being conducted once on a PC with network traffic. But even as indicators of total file size and download time, they do start to paint a pretty interesting picture.

However these figures pale into mere insignificance when compared with the weight of the George Style Blog http://georgestyle.george.com/ set up to accompany their support of Graduate Fashion Week. This homepage tops the scales at a whopping 2.8Mb (or to put it another way, not just one but two entire old HD floppy drives from the past!).

You really have to ask why this sort of bloated homepage shenanigans is still going on in this age of web page optimisation…. and whether any of these UK retailers are aware that an increase in page delivery speed can significantly improve conversion.



*Onload time is approximately the time taken for the page to start to display. Other elements are still downloading and the entire page might take much longer to fully render.

Is your website driving away customers?

Yes, that's right.... your website could be harming your business rather than helping it. How?

Well, did you know that 57% of visitors will abandon a site if it doesn't load in 3 seconds?

Yup! Although internet speeds have increased significantly over the last few years (my ISP is currently offering broadband at between 8mbps to 40mbps)..... modern websites tend to be full of complex code and large images. And to make matters worse... Internet users now expect websites to download faster than ever before.

So all that bloated script, photos and video (in a lot of cases), means those key pages that you're trying to drive users to take a long time to fully render in their browser. And all the time the user is waiting for this to happen.....they are only a click away from selecting another site.

Potentially your competition's.

Website Performance – Are you doing enough?

If you’ve read my earlier postings on the beneficial effects that webpage performance improvements can have on SEO (and this recent video where I also give a basic explanation of the eCommerce implications), then you will know I’m pretty keen on the subject of website performance optimisation. This perspective is all part of my overall view that a company’s website needs to work as hard as possible and at all times.

In my opinion, minimising the time that content takes to appear on the average user’s browser (or range of browsers) should have the same sort of priority as reducing call waiting times in a customer services centre or ensuring diners are quickly seated at a restaurant. In all three of these cases, a faster time to deliver the service is what matters.

Speed counts… and in the case of a site that transacts, speed can have a real impact on the bottom line.

So what’s a fast page response time and what’s a slow one? The complex answer to this question is “its complex”, but luckily the simple answer is “it’s simple, there are several online sources to help you”. Including: http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/ This is the first place I would visit to measure the speed of your website pages. The performance from Google is scored and suggestions given to improve your page speed in: high, medium & low priority (as well as other best practice recommendations). For example the homepage of http://www.idealinterface.co.uk/ gets a score of 85/100 http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/#url=http_3A_2F_2Fwww.idealinterface.co.uk&mobile=false Note: You can currently only use this site to measure one page at a time. It is not possible (as far as I am aware) to record a series of actions.... such as a user’s typical transaction process through your eCommerce site.

So don't dismiss the subject of website performance. You may find it could mean the difference between a good website and great one.

Why is it important to have an e-commerce website that loads quickly?

In this latest episode of online video interviews I set out why is it important to have an e-commerce website that loads quickly.

Here I talk about the current expectations in page download time and quote the popular book by Steve Krug "Don't Make Me Think".

London Web Performance Group

If you're running a site and trying to improve it in every way, you can't help but get involved in the subject of website performance. For those in the London area with an interest in Web Performance Optimization, you should look at attending the newly formed London Web Performance Group.
Sign up on meetup.com here:
http://www.meetup.com/London-Web-Performance-Group

At these monthly events site owners, vendors and consultant share knowledge with the group and learn from others who are interested in making their sites work fast to get better user experience, lower abandonment rates and make more money.

Conversion and performance calculations

A quick tip:
When working out what level of site volume and performance you need to test your website with, always speak with the person responsible for improving site conversion.
It's no use testing the site with a 2% 'look to book' ratio, if the clever people working on converting prospects to orders are looking to change their content and marketing plans to get closer to 8%. This 4-fold increase could mean the difference between site stability and downtime.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.3

Why distance impacts page load speed

Here's a very useful video from Ed Robinson, the CEO of website performance software company Aptimize. He explains why your web pages load slower depending on where your visitors are in the world.

Web page performance is something we should all be concerned about. It is now one of the many criteria that Google uses to assess a site's search relevance (See my posting about it here)

Note;
The clever graphics were done by Christine Lin Barraud who was responsible for the graphics on the CSI TV programmes.

Page response times affect SEO

Back in December I blogged about how Matt Cutts, principal engineer from Google, mentioned that the search giant had plans to use page response times to affect search engine results... well now its official!

In a post on Google's official webmaster central blog last Friday, Google Fellow Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts announced that:

today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed

So, amongst the other 'signals' (e.g. page 'relevance') that Google uses for its PageRank algorthym, it now takes the speed of the site into consideration. However site speed is a new signal and currently doesn't carry as much weight as others and currently fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal.

The data to produce this signal is collected and aggregated (into a global average) from Google's toolbar, a common plug-in to most popular browsers.

So, where does that leave your site?

Well, as I mentioned in my previous post, this could have a significant impact for slow performing sites, with more effort having to be spent on SEO and other marketing initiatives.

So surely this now ushers in the age of the website performance optimisation specialist?

When More Website Visitors Hurt Your Business

There's a well-used phase that states "More is less" and this is very true with websites that cannot handle their peak traffic. Once your website reaches the limit of the number of users, connections, bandwidth or other constraint, the more after that you get... the worse the experience is for all of them.

And since these peak periods for websites are usually the time they want to communicate or sell the most... this actually does more to harm their business than at other times. In fact according to a recent piece of reaserch by Gomez... with 51% of eCommerce customers usually shopping at peak times, you really don't have a choice if you're the website manager, but to make sure your site can handle any level of usage.

The SlideShare Presentation giving the report highlights is below:

When More Website Visitors Hurt Your Business - Are You Ready For Peak Traffic

View more presentations from Samantha McGarry.

Website performance challenges

Yesterday I posted about the potential for Google to affect its search rankings based upon response times, which looks to be a growing issue in 2010.

In fact, a recent report from Aberdeen Group highlights that many companies are still not assessing their website performance from the user's perspective and that less than a third of those surveyed have the support for their C -level executives for any website optimisation initiative.

The report also highlights the areas of concern that site owners have about their web offering, with most stating their applications as their principle worry:

Page response time matters even more now

I recently posted on the how websites need to be careful about their page response times and now it seems this has become a much bigger issue in the last couple of weeks.

Why? Well recently Matt Cutts, Google's Principle engineer, has mentioned that Google could well be factoring page response time in their organic search rankings in the future.

The impact of this change (ranking based upon how quickly a site comes back with a page to the user or the search engine spider) is that popular sites with slow pages could....

1. Find themselves pushed down the page in Google, etc. or even disappear from the first page entirely
2. Have to spend more on their SEO efforts or step-up their pay-per-click advertising to ensure they get prominence on the top of search results*
3. Have to spend more of their development and testing efforts on Volume & Performance efforts - in turn adding to project timescales
4. Bring hosting Service Level Agreements further into the spotlight

(*You try explaining to your boss why you're having to spend loads more on your Marketing budget because your site slipped down the results for key search terms)

So... with page performance becoming a more important factor, are you already measuring your page response times and comparing them against those of your competitors?