Below is live coverage of the Breaking The Speed Limit: Faster Sites Win! panel from the SMX Advanced conference.
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Barry Schwartz:
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Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land (@vanessafox) Q&A Moderator: Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance (@keyrelevance) Speakers: Jonathon Colman, Internet Marketing Manager, REI (@jcolman) Jonathan Hochman, Founder and President, Hochman Consultants (@Jehochman) Tim Mayer, Vice President, Marketing, ShopAtHome.com (@timmayer)
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Starting in a min
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Jonathon Colman, Internet Marketing Manager, REI (@jcolman) is up first
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Site Speed is your Silver Bullet
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Note: To get to the silver bullet, we had to talk about werewolves, love, feelings and body building. Long story.
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Site performance, is the one thing that makes everything better. Conversion to rankings
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Google uses speed as an organic search ranking factor for the top 1% of competitive queries (is that true?)
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Um, I think he confused it, see http://searchengineland.com/google-1-of-searches-affected-by-site-speed-ranking-factors-97570
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40% of customers will abandon any site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
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The average fortune 500 company has a site that takes 7 seconds to load
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For every one second of load time, conversion drops by 7%
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For every 1 second of load time, user satisfaction drops by 16%
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A faster site reduces the cost of infrastructure and releases by 50% or more
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This goes back to the werewolves thing
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5 Key Steps for optimizing performance:
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(1) Learn: Google and Yahoo have great resources on this
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Also stevesounders.com wrote the book on this
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Firebug, webpagetest, google analytics, google page speed, yahoo yslow are free tools
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(1) Do caching
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(2) Don’t dupleicate JavaScript, remove unused CSS
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Use < link > your css and avoid @import
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(3) …
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(4) Avoid redirects
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(5) CSS sprites to reduce HTTP requests (it is one big image, with individual images within the big image
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Best Practices when doing sprites: – Images load together – Images have similar color palettes – Images are PNGS or GIFS – Images are both small and cachable
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It was a 60 frame animated all as a CSS sprite
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Results:
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50% decrease in amount of time for Google to crawl a single page
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100% increase in amount of crawling done by GoogleBot
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1.5 seconds saved per page view per customer (saving customers 22 years of time)
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Site performance is not just about SEO it is about customer UX
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Next up Tim Mayer, Vice President, Marketing, ShopAtHome.com (@timmayer)
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Some of the site speed they have done was perceived speed improvements… Kinda like “tricks” he said.
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Back when he was at Yahoo and other search engines they looked at the value of each link, load time, how much it cost, ROI, etc
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What tools do you need to measure?
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(1) A/B Testing tool like Optimizely
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(2) Page Speed Tools
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(3) Eye Tracking, User Attention, Clicks & Scroll tools
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CrazyEgg
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(1) Be agressive with the first test to gauge the level of potential lift
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(2) Assign each link (including social buttons) a real or synthetic value to compare buckets
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How fast should your site be? Some people say it should be 2 seconds, some people compare it to competition, some people do the try your best or use site performance graders and go by their scores¿
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Tim said, take this test
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This is an under used metric but they used in search often… Throw back the header first to make the user feel it is fast
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Case Study: ShopAtHome.com
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Next up Jonathan Hochman, Founder and President, Hochman Consultants (@Jehochman)
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His test is when he goes into a restaurant he asks for a glass of water and if he doesnt get it fast enough, he leaves – cause it will just be downhill from there
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Wow, that is fast for Dallas location
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He used CloudFlare CDN to speed up his site, that is the before and after
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Complain to your host and it might get faster
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Size of your code doesn’t matter if it loads faster
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6 times more code but loads slower
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CMS & Caching: – It takes time to run server side scripts, cache the pages on the server – Caching cuts response times –
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Web Video and Speed: – Async video impacts page load speed very little – Streaming large video files from the same server not a good idea – Wistia is a good option he said
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Easy Speed Wins: – Good Hosting – Using CDN – Simplify design – Cache Plugins for CMS – Appropriate Use of Async Content
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Q&A and then You&A With Matt Cutts in about 30 minutes from now…
Errioxa:
2:36:29 pm
When we use "Change of Address" in WMT for subdomains?