Making Web Sites Fast!

Greg Keithwww.seoservicesboulder.com

Why Should Web Sites Load Quickly?

Home page with new visitor, best brand impression

Image-rich sites, keep users engaged

Web sites using full-page background images

E-commerce sites, fast-loading pages increase sales

Does Fast Help?

Damn straight! Users bounce less, come back more, view more pages, buy more products, share more links from faster sites. Data (Moz study Nov 2013) says:Intuit (Velocity 2013) reduced page load times and saw:+3% conversions for every second reduced from 15 seconds to 7 seconds

+2% conversions for every second reduced from seconds 7 to 5

+1% conversions for every second reduced from seconds 4 to 2

Obama for America campaign site (2011) Kyle Rush showed through A/B testing that a 3-second page time reduction (from 5 seconds to 2 seconds) improved onsite donations by 14%, resulting in an increase of over $34 million in election contributions

What is Fast? Google vs End-User

Matt Cutts in Aug 2010: now we count speed, though page speed is just one of 200+ Google ranking factors

Moz study (Aug 2013):Is it overall page load time (TTLB)? No, surprisingly page load time in seconds does not correlate with rankings

Is it total size? No, search rankings do not correlate with total page size

Only correlate with rankings is time to first byte (TTFB), meaning server response time is most important

Take-away: For Google search rankings, improve server response

General Approach

80/20 rule use the quickest, cheapest methods to get a significant improvement

Most importantly, aim for quick server response and reduce the amount of data sent between the client and the server

Ensure that you don't reduce data so much that image quality and richness of site experience is lost

Front-End vs Back-End

Front-end pieces the Web site owner can control: CMS software (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla), Web technologies (CSS, JavaScript, Flash)

Back-end elements are on the server (typically a Linux Apache MySQL PHP stack):- software versions- Web server modules (mod_gzip, mod_deflate, mod_SPDY, etc.)

(Front-End) Golden Rule

Almost all (80-90%) of the end-user response time is spent downloading page components: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc.

Get Your Feet Wet!

Images Ensure your images are compressed with tools like Smush.It or Kraken Image Optimizer plug-ins

Make CSS and JS small and tidy ensure CSS and JavaScript files are concatenated and minified.

Compression - Ensure compression is being used by the server, either gzip or deflate (mod_gzip or mod_deflate, httpd -l if you have SSH access).

Caching - Ensure you have a full-featured caching plug-in like W3 Total Cache, and configure it fully (including adding code to your .htaccess file if necessary).

Content Delivery Network If you want to spend a little, you'll likely see massive gains in speed by implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve your content from multiple servers, so pages are served from the closest server to the end-user.

Best Tools for Improvement

Browser add-ons like:Yahoo's Yslow

Google PageSpeed Insights

Many SaaS site speed tools now available like: pingdom.com

zoompf.com

gtmetrix.com (combines Yslow & PageSpeed)

Yahoo YSlow

PageSpeed Insights: Mobile

PageSpeed Insights: Desktop

Using Pingdom: Grade

Using Pingdom: Waterfall

Using Pingdom: Page Analysis

s

Using Zoompf: Grade

Using GTMetrix: Grade

Better Way to Optimize?

Better way than just individual optimizing is installing Google's mod_pagespeed into Apache, providing speed enhancements automagically.

Is available from many hosting providers now, but only available for VPS and dedicated hosting, not for shared hosting servers.

May be superseded by mod_SPDY.

Is Apache Still the Top Web Server?

Overall of all Web sites:Apache still serves 60.5%, Nginx 20.6%, IIS 13.9% (W3Techs).

As of July 2013, top 1000 Internet sites were running Nginx (34.9%), Apache (34.5%) and Microsoft IIS (~16%), .

WPEngine service runs Nginx, EverCache, NetDNA CDN (monthly plans $30/100/250 for 1/10/25 WP installs)

Questions/Comments/Rants?

Greg Keith www.seoservicesboulder.com