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OHYE: Hi, my name is Maile Ohye. I work at Google as a Developer Programs Tech Lead and
I manage our webmaster central blog. I like to help you better understand how Google approaches
site performance and also to help you feel more comfortable in taking those first steps
to making your site faster. In today's agenda we'll first cover the need for speed and why
we at Google think speed is a primary importance. Next, faster on the frontend: for little or
no money down. It turns out that you can make a lot of improvements to your site without
investing thousands of dollars in a new architecture. But just by some simple tweaks to your HTML.
Then we'll look at the available tools. These are things like site performance and webmaster
tools as well as page speed. Next, frequently asked questions, and then recapping the three
steps to success. And then we'll summarize by looking ahead and talking about the importance
of performance and how it can apply to the SEO industry as a whole. So let's get in to
the need for speed. Speed increases conversions. In side-by-side testing of an optimized site
versus the original version, the only thing that was different was that the optimized
site was faster but all the content was the same. Shopzilla and Firefox had some interesting
findings. At Shopzilla, they found a 7 to 12% increase in conversions just by making
their site faster. At Firefox they had a 15.4% increase in downloads. They estimate this
means 60 million extra downloads from these minor tweaks to landing pages. What are these
minor tweaks? Firefox said that it comes down to one factor, speed. The next need for speed
is that a faster site increases user satisfaction. Google and Microsoft ran a test where they
actually gave some users delayed results. They found that the more delay, the more unhappy
the user. And you can see this in these user satisfaction numbers. At 500 milliseconds
or a half second delay, satisfaction was decreased almost 1%. When you get up to two seconds
you're nearing 4%. In fact, these users were so dissatisfied that Microsoft actually ended
the experiment fairly quickly. The last case I wanted to cover about why site performance
is so important? Is that a slow site actually has lasting negative effects. Google and Microsoft
ran another experiment where they only implemented less than a half second delay or 400 milliseconds.
They found that for those users, that they gave these delayed results to, they actually
saw a decrease in query volume. So that continued to trend for about seven weeks. At seven weeks
they totally removed the experiment. But it turns out that while the query volume went
up for those users, it still never reached the level even at week 11 of where they were
prior to the experiment starting. So a fast site increases conversions. It helps you have
increased user satisfaction and know that a slow site causes not only dissatisfaction
but lasting effects. Because speed is so important and because we aim to give users the best
search experience possible. Site performance is now a factor in Google rankings. Ranking
is a nuanced process and there's over 200 signals. But now speed is one of them. Know
that content and relevance are still primary, but making your site faster can also help.
The good news is you can have a much faster website on a low budget. Steve Souders, who
is my co-league at Google and wrote the books "High performance websites" and "Even faster
websites", calls this the performance golden rule. Steve says that 80 to 90% of the end-user
response time is spent on the frontend. Start there. I found this particularly interesting
because I would have thought it was on optimizing your database or making sure that you scaled
your architecture. But it turns out that so much can be done on the frontend. And to prove
this, I have a waterfall view of my website taken from WebPagetest.org. Here, you can
actually see the different request that were made just to retrieve my homepage. So at under
one second is when the content from my website was returned to the browser. At just over
one second, the browser actually started to render my content. But then it had to make
all these different requests for different images. So the final page didn't load until
after seven seconds. So there's a lot of improvements to be made there. So let's talk about some
other tools that Google offers that can help to make your site faster. First we have webmaster
tools. There is a feature called site performance. So for your verified site in webmaster tools,
inside site performance, it can give you a pretty good gauge of how your site performs.
We'll tell you the average load time as well as how your site's speed compared to other
sites on the web. So if your site is faster than say 95% of the other sites on the web
then you might know that you can then start to prioritize just building out content. However,
if your site's on the slower end of sites on the web then you really know that you should
make speed a priority. In addition to site performance and webmaster tools, we also have
page speed. Page speed is a firebug plug-in that you can use on any URL. So I went ahead
and did it on my own site. I ran page speed and I was given an average score which was
75 out of 100 which is essentially my being a "C" student. What page speed did was also
tell me in priority some of the things that I should work on. And it gave me specific
recommendations under those general ideas. So let's take a look at this first one, leverage
browser caching. So browser caching is the idea of--and subsequent visits to a website
that they don't have to retrieve the content again because it's actually stored in the
cache. So I went to my hosting site and looked up "How would I make this work?" So I looked
up increase caching, there on the support pages of my hoster I see "How can I increase
the time that web browsers cache my files for?" So I went ahead and click that. I used
to work on web servers a long time ago but not so much anymore. So much of this stuff
is kind of refreshing to me. So it actually told me about setting a longer cache time.
At my hoster, and perhaps likely on yours, it'll actually give you the syntax that you
can add to your HT access file. And this is going to help your web server to read it for
configurations on how to actually implement caching. So I saw this here, "ExpiresByType"
and it gave some syntax. I just looked that up a little bit more because I don't want
to make it just one month. But I want to make it for years. Found the syntax here, so that's
great. So now we can pretty much just put this in a note pad, adjust it, then I can
log in to my own website, do SSH, I copy over my old HT access file just so that I have
it as a backup, and then I edit it adding this new syntax to have now expires in caching.
Terrific. Now when I rerun page speed with these caching improvements, I can see that
my overall score has improved. I went from a "C" student to 80 out of 100 which is a
borderline "B" student. This makes me extremely happy. This caching improvement can be seen
again when I go back to WebPagetest.org and actually refetch my website. Before on the
second request for my page, it still required over seven seconds to load but now with caching
implemented its 1.3 seconds. Thus far, we've covered why speed is important and then the
available tools that Google and others have available to make your site faster. Now let's
cover some frequently asked questions, "Is it possible to check my server response time
from different areas around the world?" Definitely. Thankfully, WebPagetest.org allows you to
actually test retrievals from different parts of the United States like East Coast or West
Coast, as well as United Kingdom, China, and New Zealand. The next question "What's a good
response time to aim for?" Well, first keep in mind that if your competition is fast.
Then they might be providing a better user experience for your same audience. So it's
always good to know what others are offering. After that, there have been studies by Akamai
who found that two seconds is actually the threshold for e-commerce site acceptability.
Meaning that that's what users like to shop with. At Google, we aim for under a half second.
The last question is "Does progressive rendering help users?" Definitely. Progressive rendering
is when the browser displays whatever content it has available as soon as possible. So it
can display at increments. And you can oppose this to the idea of a browser waiting for
seconds and then displaying everything at once. Progressive rendering is important because
it provides users that visual feedback and helps them to feel more in control. Microsoft
being actually tested this. They sent the visual header being the logo and the search
box first and then the ads and the search results as they were calculated. Microsoft
found a 0.7% increased in satisfaction with progressive rendering. They said this was
compared to a full feature roll out. But again, this just had to do with progressive rendering
not an actual feature. So how can you implement progressive rendering on your own site? Put
style sheets at the top of the page. This allows a browser to start displaying content
ASAP. We've covered a lot of material here. So let's just recap three steps to a faster
site. First, check out site performance in webmaster tools. There, you'll get a good
gauge of how your site performs in relation to the rest of the web. And from that, you
can determine whether performance should really be a priority or whether you can actually
start working on other features? Next, install page speed. While site performance has recommendations
for how to make your site faster, page speed is much more comprehensive. And third, just
explore. Check out tools like Yslow, WebPagetest.org, or hang out in the "Make the web faster" forum.
Let's summarized by taking a look ahead at how performance can actually impact the SEO
industry if a faster site has now been proven to increase conversions, page views, and time
on site. Meanwhile, lowering bounce rate and operating cost. In fact, Shopzilla found that
by just speeding up their site, it decreased their operating cost by 50%. So this is why
I personally find performance so important because not only is it great for users, but
it actually helps provide measurable SEO value. Thanks so much for your time today. For more
information, visit code.google.com/speed.