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:
2:28:58 pm
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)
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)
Barry Schwartz:
2:32:33 pm
Starting in a min
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2:33:07 pm
Barry Schwartz:
2:36:06 pm
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2:36:26 pm
Jonathon Colman, Internet Marketing Manager, REI (@jcolman) is up first
Barry Schwartz:
2:36:43 pm
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2:39:19 pm
Site Speed is your Silver Bullet
Barry Schwartz:
2:40:03 pm
Note: To get to the silver bullet, we had to talk about werewolves, love, feelings and body building. Long story.
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2:40:17 pm
Site performance, is the one thing that makes everything better. Conversion to rankings
Barry Schwartz:
2:40:51 pm
Google uses speed as an organic search ranking factor for the top 1% of competitive queries (is that true?)
Barry Schwartz:
2:41:16 pm
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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2:41:35 pm
40% of customers will abandon any site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Barry Schwartz:
2:42:05 pm
The average fortune 500 company has a site that takes 7 seconds to load
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2:42:17 pm
For every one second of load time, conversion drops by 7%
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2:42:33 pm
For every 1 second of load time, user satisfaction drops by 16%
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2:42:58 pm
A faster site reduces the cost of infrastructure and releases by 50% or more
Barry Schwartz:
2:43:52 pm
Barry Schwartz:
2:44:05 pm
This goes back to the werewolves thing
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2:44:34 pm
5 Key Steps for optimizing performance:
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2:45:03 pm
(1) Learn: Google and Yahoo have great resources on this
Barry Schwartz:
2:45:31 pm
Also stevesounders.com wrote the book on this
Barry Schwartz:
2:45:50 pm
Firebug, webpagetest, google analytics, google page speed, yahoo yslow are free tools
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2:46:29 pm
(1) Do caching
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2:47:20 pm
(2) Don't dupleicate JavaScript, remove unused CSS
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2:48:21 pm
Use < link > your css and avoid @import
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2:48:46 pm
(3) ...
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2:48:52 pm
(4) Avoid redirects
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2:49:09 pm
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2:50:32 pm
(5) CSS sprites to reduce HTTP requests (it is one big image, with individual images within the big image
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2:51:52 pm
Best Practices when doing sprites:
- Images load together
- Images have similar color palettes
- Images are PNGS or GIFS
- Images are both small and cachable
- Images load together
- Images have similar color palettes
- Images are PNGS or GIFS
- Images are both small and cachable
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2:52:12 pm
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2:52:51 pm
It was a 60 frame animated all as a CSS sprite
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2:52:58 pm
Results:
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2:53:13 pm
50% decrease in amount of time for Google to crawl a single page
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2:53:27 pm
100% increase in amount of crawling done by GoogleBot
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2:53:46 pm
1.5 seconds saved per page view per customer (saving customers 22 years of time)
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2:54:01 pm
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2:54:18 pm
Site performance is not just about SEO it is about customer UX
Barry Schwartz:
2:57:08 pm
Next up Tim Mayer, Vice President, Marketing, ShopAtHome.com (@timmayer)
Barry Schwartz:
2:57:22 pm
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2:57:40 pm
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2:58:02 pm
Some of the site speed they have done was perceived speed improvements... Kinda like "tricks" he said.
Barry Schwartz:
2:58:33 pm
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
Barry Schwartz:
2:59:17 pm
What tools do you need to measure?
Barry Schwartz:
2:59:33 pm
(1) A/B Testing tool like Optimizely
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3:01:13 pm
(2) Page Speed Tools
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3:01:32 pm
(3) Eye Tracking, User Attention, Clicks & Scroll tools
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3:01:47 pm
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3:01:50 pm
CrazyEgg
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3:02:09 pm
(1) Be agressive with the first test to gauge the level of potential lift
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3:03:39 pm
(2) Assign each link (including social buttons) a real or synthetic value to compare buckets
Barry Schwartz:
3:04:28 pm
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¿
Barry Schwartz:
3:04:41 pm
Tim said, take this test
Barry Schwartz:
3:04:56 pm
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3:05:15 pm
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3:05:38 pm
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
Barry Schwartz:
3:06:04 pm
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3:06:36 pm
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3:07:18 pm
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3:07:52 pm
Case Study: ShopAtHome.com
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3:08:08 pm
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3:08:49 pm
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3:09:01 pm
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3:09:27 pm
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3:10:28 pm
Next up Jonathan Hochman, Founder and President, Hochman Consultants (@Jehochman)
Barry Schwartz:
3:11:09 pm
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3:12:10 pm
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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3:12:29 pm
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3:16:23 pm
Wow, that is fast for Dallas location
Barry Schwartz:
3:17:32 pm
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3:18:15 pm
He used CloudFlare CDN to speed up his site, that is the before and after
Barry Schwartz:
3:18:28 pm
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3:18:56 pm
Barry Schwartz:
3:19:14 pm
Complain to your host and it might get faster
Barry Schwartz:
3:19:29 pm
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3:19:45 pm
Size of your code doesn't matter if it loads faster
Barry Schwartz:
3:20:03 pm
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3:20:09 pm
6 times more code but loads slower
Barry Schwartz:
3:20:41 pm
CMS & Caching:
- It takes time to run server side scripts, cache the pages on the server
- Caching cuts response times
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- It takes time to run server side scripts, cache the pages on the server
- Caching cuts response times
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Barry Schwartz:
3:21:40 pm
Barry Schwartz:
3:22:15 pm
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
- 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
Barry Schwartz:
3:22:53 pm
Barry Schwartz:
3:23:29 pm
Easy Speed Wins:
- Good Hosting
- Using CDN
- Simplify design
- Cache Plugins for CMS
- Appropriate Use of Async Content
- Good Hosting
- Using CDN
- Simplify design
- Cache Plugins for CMS
- Appropriate Use of Async Content
Barry Schwartz:
3:25:25 pm
Q&A and then You&A With Matt Cutts in about 30 minutes from now...
Errioxa:
3:36:29 pm
When we use "Change of Address" in WMT for subdomains?
