…And how you can be ready.
Ah, PageSpeed. The ranking factor and website performance metric that is the bane of so many webmaster’s existence. On one hand, you want to make sure that your end user and Google have the quickest experience possible, but on the other hand you want to make the interactive experience a unique feature for your brand and website.
To top it all off, many webmasters are moving towards responsive design, which means that essentially the same thing is loaded on your mobile site as desktop, it’s just resized. Major load time drag occurs in some instances.
So, what can be done?
A great place to start is by reducing the page load speed on your desktop site!
One thing we see over and over again is mountains of JavaScript and unnecessary CSS.
The fix? Eliminate, then externalize what’s left. This will serve two benefits: The first is less crawling that Google has to get through and render for your site. The second benefit is a great reduction in page size overall.
The next step is to utilize Google Tag Manager. Simple implementation of tag management system puts the strain of multiple tracking tools onto Google’s server, rather than running the JavaScript on your own server. Implementation is as easy as installing Google Analytics and this implementation will also ensure that all pixels are consistently up to date, as well.
The next (and Final) recommendation: AMP!
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is currently reserved heavily for news related page. However, we believe there’s is a long-term benefit to implementing AMP on even ecommerce pages. The reason, of course, is load time! AMP, at it’s core, is a way for Google to interpret content easier when it’s displayed in news feed, but it also cuts back on a lot of rendering time.
We also believe that editorial content is just the beginning of AMP, and it could become an essential mobile ranking factor down the road.
There’s several great tools that you can use to measure your page speed, but the best place to begin is Google’s own tool, which has gone through a significant facelift recently to be even more informative. Coincidence? Hardly. So use it, optimize your site performance, and watch those rankings improve!
