Site Speed: The Ultimate UX Feature… for SEO

A case study on how to increase search engine crawling and online conversion Jonathon Colman In-House SEO at REIREI Twitter

Why Speed Matters to You [ 1|4 ] Customers expect your web site to load in 2 seconds or less. 40% of them will abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds. Source: Forrester/Akamai [via GetElastic]Forrester/AkamaiGetElastic

Why Speed Matters to You [ 2|4 ] For every 1 second of load time, online conversion drops by 7% and overall customer satisfaction drops by 16%. Source: StrangeloopStrangeloop

Why Speed Matters to You [ 3|4 ] Google uses speed as an organic search ranking factor for the top 1% of competitive queries. Sources: Google, Matt Cutts [via Search Engine Land]GoogleMatt Cutts

Why Speed Matters to You [ 4|4 ] A faster site reduces the costs of both infrastructure and releases by 50% or more. Source: Shopzilla [via O’Reilly]ShopzillaO’Reilly

Why Speed Matters to Your Users When [web sites] are fast, you feel good. What that ultimately comes down to is that you feel in control. —Matt Mullenweg Co-founder of Wordpress Source: Improving Performance in Mature Web AppsImproving Performance in Mature Web Apps 2009 Velocity Conference “ “ That feeling… translates to happiness.

Source: Google Code – Web Performance Best PracticesGoogle Code – Web Performance Best Practices Photo © Flickr user Purplemattfish: flickr.com/photos/purplemattfish/ / Leverage browser caching Leverage proxy caching Cache non-changing files: JavaScript CSS Banner images

Source: Google Code – Web Performance Best PracticesGoogle Code – Web Performance Best Practices Photo © Flickr user Batigolix: flickr.com/photos/batigolix/ / Minimize DNS lookups Minimize redirects Avoid bad requests Combine external JavaScript Combine external CSS Combine images w/ CSS sprites Optimize order of styles, scripts Avoid document.write Avoid

Source: Google Code – Web Performance Best PracticesGoogle Code – Web Performance Best Practices Photo © Flickr user Remi Longva: flickr.com/photos/remilongva/ / Enable compression Remove unused CSS Minify JavaScript, CSS Minify HTML Defer loading of JavaScript Optimize images Serve scaled images

Source: Google Code – Web Performance Best PracticesGoogle Code – Web Performance Best Practices Screenshot taken by Wikipedia user Korodzik: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NCSA_Mosaic.PNG Use efficient CSS selectors Avoid CSS expressions Put CSS in the document head Specify image dimensions Specify a character set

The Results: Crawl Time/Page Source: Google Webmaster Tools – Crawl stats reportGoogle Webmaster Tools A 50% decrease in the time it took for Google to crawl an average page.

The Results: Page Crawl Volume Source: Google Webmaster Tools – Crawl stats reportGoogle Webmaster Tools A 100% increase in the amount of total pages Google crawled per day.

The Results: Site Performance Source: Google Webmaster Tools – Site performance report [data formatted off-line in Excel]Google Webmaster Tools An 0.5 second savings in page load time.

The Results: Conversion Rate Source: In-house web analytics reporting Photo © Flickr user Largeprime: flickr.com/photos/largeprimenumber

Get Started Now with Free Tools  Review site speed best practices by Yahoo and GoogleYahooGoogle  See the Google Webmaster Tools site performance reportGoogle Webmaster Tools  Learn how to get your site speed data in Google Analyticsget your site speed data  Use Google’s Page Speed Online tool, Chrome extensionPage Speed OnlineChrome extension  Use the YSlow extension for Firefox, ChromeFirefoxChrome  Try out the WebPageTest or Pingdom test suitesWebPageTestPingdom

Thank You! Jonathon Colman In-House SEO for REIREI Home:about.me/jcolmanabout.me/jcolman