Across the board, all the sites we are maintaining have seen an average speed increase of 22%
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been hard at work going through each and every site we host. Making sure they are performing the best that they can. We’ve installed software to help with the caching as well as image optimisation. Our sites should run smoother, and faster for everyone on both desktop and mobile.
Several aspects of a website, from it’s general performance, to helping it perform well for Google in both organic and paid ad space are improved by these speed upgrades. Googles most recent algorithms take in to account speed on both mobile and desktop performance. So we are making sure that we have updated all our sites so they have the best chance of success.
We use several tools to help us determine the best course of action to take regarding the speed an usability of our sites: Googles own PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, and WebPageTest are the main ones. Each giving a slightly different view on what can be done to increase the speed of a site. So taking all this data in to account, we make changes to the tools we use so that the site performs the best it can.
These tools (and there are a few others we may include occasionally), give us some details that we can use to build upon, and make a site run smoother, and faster.
Mobile traffic is increasing, so we need to ensure that our mobile speed is the best it can be
With the increase in mobile traffic that we have seen, working to ensure that the mobile version of each of our sites is also a major consideration. We test and test again, including the mobile version of a site is optimised as best as it can be.
Google Adwords is our primary source for Advertising on our sites, what does Google have to say about mobile traffic:
Although speed has been used in ranking for some time, that signal was focused on desktop searches. Today we’re announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.
As Google is a primary source for traffic and ads to our sites, we focus on ensuring Google is as happy as can be with the speed and presentation of our sites. Both mobile and desktop version garner attention in this area, so we test speeds and then test again.
Before optimisation on GTMetrix shows a long load time and some areas for improvement.
After optimisation you can see speed increases and a better score over-all.
Google Page Speed before optimisation
Google Page Speed after optimisation
Mobile is becoming King.
Google continues to focus more and more on mobile these days. Making changes earlier in the year that tries to put well designed mobile sites to the forefront. We design all our sites to be ready for desktop as well as responsive on mobile devices. This puts our sites in a good spot to be included in mobile only searches.
…our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have typically used the desktop version of a page’s content, which may cause issues for mobile searchers when that version is vastly different from the mobile version. Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for.
-From Rolling out mobile first indexing on Googles Webmaster Central Blog
WebPageTest before optimisation
