For the 2nd year in a row, I’ll be participating in a local mountain bike race here in Aspen, The Power of 4. I’ve been training all summer to find small gains in performance that add up to something significant by working hard and measuring results. We’ll see how the race goes, my odds of winning have diminished a bit since Lance Armstrong announced he’ll be racing as well, but I feel like I’ve become a faster rider and that makes riding even more fun for me.
Website performance works in much the same way- a fast website is far more rewarding for the user than a slow one. And there isn’t usually a magic fix to speed things up, it takes some real analysis to see where the bottlenecks are and then strategically eliminate them. No PED’s required.
The latest rounds of Google algorithm changes continue to highlight the importance of User Experience (UX). Content is no longer king. Rather, content served in an intuitive, natural, and FAST manner is king. For years SEO professionals focused on making sure the search engines understood what the main topic of a page or site was. Tools like meta data, page titles, and keyword density were important—the thought was that you had to spell out to search engines what it was your content pertained to . Search algorithms have become much more nuanced in their analysis of page content—taking into account context, architecture, and workflow. All of those factors align with many others—design, writing style, and speed—contribute to the overall user experience. And that’s what Google is really after: providing search results that give the searcher the most positive and accurate results coming from the sites that perform the best.
While only a small percentage of websites are being penalized by Google for slow page-load times, in the ever-competitive SEO market, being faster than the competition could mean leap-frogging them in rankings. With that in mind, we’ve trained our SEO account managers to analyze your site for speed issues, and we have the tools to speed things up if need be. Techniques that range from the obvious—sizing images appropriately, to the highly technical—advanced caching methods and script compression, all work together to speed things up on-site. Contact us to see how we can help increase site performance and improve UX.