Just like Google searches done on a desktop, as of July, mobile searches now also consider speed. The Silicon Valley company has indeed expressed that mobile content, even if very relevant, will be bumped down the search engine’s results pages if it takes too long to load.
It is commonly accepted that a page’s loading speed has a strong impact on conversion rates, and as a result, on the overall performance of online sales. With this announcement, Google takes a step further by stating that a mobile site with poor web performance will lose visibility by being less well referenced. The direct result is a reduction in the number of visits to the site. Online sales numbers are directly linked to these two factors, so a site’s profitability hangs in the balance.

In June 2017, 56% of visits to websites in France were made from a mobile device (source DN/Médiamétrie and eStat), so online retailers should not just think “mobile first” but “fast mobile first”, or they risk jeopardizing their sales volumes. The American giant’s decision to demand good user experience will require online retailers to change in step.

With this change, e-merchants must therefore work to improve their mobile web performance. More than 500 online businesses have already followed the steps below to avoid being relegated to the famous search engine’s lower ranks:

1/ Identify Your Key Pages
Google is a major source of traffic for e-commerce sites. Based on what they search and Google’s index, web users won’t  all land on the same page. It is therefore best to first identify the pages upon which users most frequently land, and then focus your efforts on those ones first. The most cost-effective and pragmatic approach is to take note of the most important pages for your business and concentrate on them.

2/ Compare the Speed of Your Key Pages To Those of Your Competitors
By using Google’s automatic test page, you can compare your site to that of your competitors. When the test is complete, you just have to select your industry to see if you are one of the good or bad students.

3/ Optimize
Among the most important recommendations:
– Use a cache system (CDN)
– Enable compression on your server
– Compress and resize images in order to provide the user with content that is always perfectly tailored to their device

The list of optimizations to complete (and to maintain over time!) is long. Google also
provides PageSpeed Insights, a tool you can use to determine if the improvements you implement on your site are making an immediate effect.

4/ Monitor
An e-commerce site is a complex and perpetually moving machine. Every week, your site undergoes several changes that may lead to unexpected slowdowns or disruptions. If these performance problems are not identified and corrected before Google next analyzes your site, they can have serious repercussions on your site’s ranking. Implementing a system of continuous measurement, slowdown identification, and alerting is therefore necessary for your site’s long-term success.

L’article Google Speed Update: When Web Performance Impacts SEO, How Do You Ensure Your Mobile Site is Up to Speed? est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Time to take a look. 😉

AMP, or the idea of an ever faster web on mobile

Like me, you must have experienced in the past the frustration of not being able to load content on your mobile, even when all you wanted to do was access a simple information.

In this situation, you probably left the website to look for the same content elsewhere. And you’re surely not the only one that reacted like this! Most Internet users react negatively to delays and favor the fastest experiences. This user behavior results in a much better user engagement rate, and better referencing, for websites that have bet on Web Performance.

And it is in this context of a quest for immediacy, that the open-source project AMP was launched in 2016, by Google. This project has since grown to become a community of more than 160 contributors around the world.

In concrete terms, AMP describes a format that allows you to create a page that will appear more quickly on mobile terminals. We are talking here about a median time perceived by users of less than 1 second.

Technically, AMP pages are just “normal” web pages, in HTML, and therefore compatible with all web browsers. They are nevertheless fine-tuned to be very light when loading on a mobile phone. And this is where this project becomes interesting for Quanta, as Google directly broaches the issue of Web Performance on mobile.

How AMP works

AMP tends to several problems for the speed of content display.

• Instant loading (originally Instant rendering)

With AMP, there is the possibility to pre-load links that the user would want to click, so that when he clicks, the content appears immediately as if it were already fully cached (in fact it’s the same principle as the cache for that matter, except that it is built even before accessing the content for the first time).

In order to not overload the CPU and the bandwidth necessary to load content that a user would not eventually see, the AMP system will simply pre-load the top of the landing page only and, when the user actually accesses the content, the rest of the page is loaded while he reads the top of the page.

• Pre-set layout while the items load

In AMP, the size of each element is set in the HTML, in order to avoid “surprises” during loading. Once the text is displayed, it will not move until the user interacts with the page, thus ensuring that the reading is not disturbed.

Of course, this principle is not limited to simple text. 😉 If you have videos and lots of funky stuff (like call-to-actions) that you need to display between the paragraphs of your text, AMP can be a valuable help thanks to the system of placeholders.

With placeholders, you can display banner ads, videos, or any other item with a variety of extensions, but the size of each item will be predefined on the page, with a pre-set area (typically a gray square).

A simple example would be a Youtube video. On an AMP page, a predefined rectangle will appear first, then fill up with the preview of a YouTube video while the user is quietly reading the article.

This system of placeholders for the elements of an AMP page makes the (recurring) problem  of pages that shift, as the elements are loaded, no longer an issue. Ever tried to read a book while being disturb every 3 seconds? Nightmare… Thus, with AMP, you no longer need to “scroll down” to find the line on which you were. And that’s quite an improvement in user experience.

• Fonts

There is some technical cumbersomeness in the loading of fonts, which for most pages comes very late during the process of loading a page. Typically, fonts will be loaded after any content that can possibly call a font, or after all the javascripts. With AMP, the loading order is optimized, and the fonts will be able to load from the beginning, in parallel with the rest, which ultimately makes the final display much faster.

• Analytics and speed finally united

With AMP, the use of tags is limited so as to avoid having several tags potentially blocking the page.

At Quanta, we see that some emerchants frequently keep tags that they no longer use, which slow down their users. And each of these slowdowns has a negative impact on their conversion rates.

In AMP, the subject was therefore taken seriously to avoid as much as possible these untimely loadings. Tags can be called, but only via a single interface that can not slow down the page (asynchronous). For most tag vendors, the implementation of Google’s system is quite simple. But, if you use more “exotic” tags, you’ll need to do little technical adaptation to use them with AMP.

All these specificities of the AMP system didn’t come out of nowhere. These are the result of many tests and clever choices made by a college of performance gurus, who probably had enough of seeing that the Internet is still slow, despite all the technological progress.

An innovation and … a controversy

Google AMP ultimately aims for a loading speed, so far unmatched, on mobile; a loading that now seems “instantaneous”. Therefore, this seems a perfect web performance weapon.

However, like any technical innovation, Google AMP does not come without controversy.

Firstly, it should be noted that this new format was launched without the W3C’s approval, which, as everyone knows, act like a wise council, and is responsible for regulating the Internet in an open and independent way. This tacit respect for the role of W3C on the net often makes it possible for new formats that may appear to become technical standards, and thus to be widely used. By bypassing W3C, Google takes the risk to see the AMP format disappear quickly.

In addition, another recurring criticism made by many web analysts (especially when you look at the articles of The Register, or CSS-Tricks on the subject, which is a must-read) concerns the underlying nature of the AMP project.

As I explained in this article, the concept of AMP aims at adapting the content to technical specifications which, in turn, serve Web Performance. The fear of many authors is that in the long run, in the hope of seeing their SEO in Google maintained, and their appeal to users untouched, the creators of digital content end up impoverishing their productions to stick to the technical recommendations of Google.

Fear certainly justified, but with regard to the benefits in terms of Web Performance, at Quanta, we assume that, as always: “The truth lies somewhere in the middle.”

And you, what do you think of Google AMP? Do you use it for your website? Do not hesitate to leave us comments!

L’article Google AMP, when immediacy becomes a rule est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Page Speed Insights and loading time

 Page Speed Insights focuses on two essential loading times:

• the loading time of content above the waterline (time between the user’s query and the complete display of elements on the screen);
• the time to complete loading the page (when all elements are displayed).

Page Speed Insights turns out to be very useful because it focuses on performance related to the processing of the page by the user’s browser. This focus, which allows setting aside network performance, gives a global scope of your site’s performance, and it shows areas to be improved in order to make your site evolve. Google improves its tool frequently, and in 2014 it implemented a number of innovations. Emphasis was placed on the evaluation of site performance on mobile devices (smart phones and tablets) and on improving usability.

Evaluate the speed of your mobile site thanks to Page Speed Insights

Since mid-2014, Page Speed Insights integrates new recommendations for navigating mobile sites. Google shows its commitment in providing solutions to webmasters, to help them have mobile-friendly sites. “Suppose your mobile site takes 2 seconds to load instead of 7 as it used to. If users still have to spend 5 more seconds waiting once the page has loaded in order to zoom or scroll the screen before they can read the text and interact with the page, then the site is not truly fast. The new features of Page Speed Insights can help you find and fix these usability issues,” says Google in this post that announced the arrival of updates.

L’article Adapt your site to mobile users with Page Speed Insights est apparu en premier sur Quanta.