Site Performance For Webmasters

Key Takeaways

hi my name is Miley o I work at Google as a developer programs Tech lead and I manage our Web Master Central blog i' like to help you better understand how Google approaches site performance and also to help you feel more comfortable in taking those first steps to making your site faster in today's agenda we'll first cover the Need for Speed and why we at Google think speed is of primary importance next faster on the front end for little or no money down it turns out that you can make a lot of improvements to your site without investing thousands of dollars in a new architecture but just buy some simple tweaks to your HTML then we'll look at the available tools these are things like site performance and Web Master tools as well as page speed next frequently asked questions and then recapping the three steps to success and then we'll summarize by looking ahead and talking about the importance of performance and how it can apply to the SEO industry as a whole so let's get into the Need for Speed speed increases conversions in side by-side testing of an optimized site versus the original version the only thing that was different was that the optimized site was faster but but all the content was the same Shopzilla and Firefox had some interesting findings at Shopzilla they found a 7 to 12% increase in conversions just by making their site faster at Firefox they had a 15.4% increase in downloads they estimate this means 60 million extra downloads from these minor tweaks to landing pages what are these minor tweaks Firefox said that it comes down to one factor speed the next Need for Speed is that a faster site increases user satisfaction Google and Microsoft ran a test where they actually gave some users delayed results they found that the more delay the more unhappy the user and you can see this in these user satisfaction numbers at 500 milliseconds or a half second delay satisfaction was decreased almost 1% when you get up to 2 seconds your nearing 4% in fact these users were so dissatisfied that Microsoft actually ended the experiment fairly quickly the last case I wanted to cover about why site performance is so important is that a slow sight actually has lasting negative effects Google and Microsoft ran another experiment where they only implemented less than a half second delay or 400 millisecs they found that for those users that they gave these delayed results to they actually saw a decrease in query volume so that continued to trend for about seven weeks at seven weeks they totally removed the experiment but it turns out that while the query volume went up for those users it still never reached the level even at week 11 of where they were prior to the experiment starting so a fast site increases conversions it helps you have increased user satisfaction and know that a slow sight causes not only dissatisfaction but lasting effect because speed is so important and because we aim to give users the best search experience possible site performance is now a factor in Google rankings ranking is a nuanced process and there's over 200 signals but now speed is one of them know that content and relevance are still primary but making your site faster can also help the good news is you can have a much faster website on a low budget Steve saers who is my colleague at Google and who wrote the book's high performance websites and even faster websites calls this the performance Golden Rule Steve says that 80 to 90% of the enduser response time is spent on the front end start there I found this particularly interesting because I would have thought it was on optimizing your database or making sure that you scaled your architecture but it turns out that so much can be done on the front end and to prove this I have a waterfall view of my website taken from webpagetest.org here you can actually see the different requests that were made just to retrieve my homepage so at under one second is when the content from my website was returned to the browser at just over one second the browser actually started to render my content but then it had to make all these different requests for different images so the final page didn't load until after 7 seconds so there's a lot of improvements to be made there so let's talk about some of the tools that Google offers that can help to make your site faster first we have Web Master tools there is a feature called site performance so for your verified site and Web Master tools inside site performance we can give you a pretty good gauge of how your site performs will tell you the average low time as well as how your site's speed compares to other other sites on the web so if your site is faster than say 95% of the other sites on the web then you might know that you can then start to prioritize just building out content however if your sit's on the slower end of sites on the web then you really know that you should make speed a priority in addition to site performance and Web Master tools we also have page speed page speed is a firebug plug-in that you can use on any URL so I went ahead and did it on my own site I ran page speed and I was given an average score which was 75 out of 100 which is essentially my being a c student what PP did was also tell me in priority some of the things that I should work on and it gave me specific recommendations under those General ideas so let's take a look at this first one leverage browser caching so browser caching is the idea of on subsequent visits to a website site that they don't have to retrieve the content again because it's actually stored in the cach so I went to my hosting site and looked up how would I make this work so I looked up increase caching there on the support pages of my Hoster I see how can I increase the time that web browsers cash my files for so I went ahead and clicked that I used to work on web servers a long time ago but not so much anymore so U much of this stuff is kind of refreshing to me so it actually told me um about setting a longer Cash Time at my Hoster and perhaps likely on yours it'll actually give you the syntax that you can add to your HT access file and this is going to help your web server to read it for configurations on how to actually Implement caching so I saw this here um expires by type and it gave some syntax I just looked that up a little bit more because I don't want to make it just one month but I want to make it for years found the syntax here so that's great so now we can pretty much just put this in a notepad adjust it then I can log into my own website through SSH I copy over my old HT access file just so that I have it as a backup and then I edit it adding this new syntax to have now expires and caching terrific now when I rerun page speed with these caching improvements I can see that my overall score has improved I went from a c student to 80 out of 100 which is a borderline B student this makes me extremely happy this caching Improvement can be seen again when I go back to webpage test.org and actually refetch my website before on the second request from my page it still required over 7 Seconds to load but now with caching implemented it's 1.3 seconds thus far we've covered why speed is important and then the available tools that Google and others have available to make your site faster now let's cover some frequently asked questions is it possible to check my server response time from different areas around the world definitely thankfully webpagetest.org allows you to actually test retrievals from different parts of the United States like East Coast or West Coast as well as United Kingdom China and New Zealand the next question what's a good response time to aim for well first keep in mind that if your competition is fast then they might be providing a better user experience for your same audience so it's always good to know what others are offering after that um there have been studies by aamai who found that 2 seconds is actually the threshold for e-commerce site acceptability meaning that that's what users like to shop with at Google we aim for under a half second the last question is does Progressive rendering help users definitely Progressive rendering is when the browser displays whatever content it has available as soon as possible so it can display in increments and you can oppose this to the idea of of a browser waiting for seconds and then displaying Everything at Once Progressive rendering is important because it provides users that visual feedback and helps them to feel more in control Microsoft Bing actually tested this they sent the visual the visual header being the logo and the search box first and then the ads and the search results as they were calculated Microsoft found a 7% increase in satisfaction with Progressive rendering they said this was compared to a full feature roll out but again this just had to do with Progressive rendering not an actual feature so how can you implement Progressive rendering on your own site put stylesheets at the top of the page this allows a browser to start displaying content ASAP we've covered a lot of material here so let's just recap three steps to a faster site first check out site performance and Web Master tools there you'll get a good gauge of how your site performs in relation to the rest of the web and from it you can determine whether performance should really be a priority or whether you can actually start working on other features next install page speed while site performance has recommendations for how to make your site faster page speed is much more comprehensive and third just explore check out tools like why slow webpage test.org or hang out in the make the web faster for him let's summarize by taking a look ahead at how performance can actually impact the SEO industry if a fter site has now been proven to increase conversions page views and time on site meanwhile lowering bounce rate and operating costs in fact Shopzilla found that by just speeding up their site it decreased their operating costs by 50% so this is why I personally find performance so important because not only not only is it great for users but it actually helps provide measurable SEO value thanks so much for your time today for more information visit code.google.com/speed