How to increase your site’s speed, performance and quality
There’s one thing that never gets old when it comes to SEO.
And that’s speed.
I’d argue it’s one of the most important technical factors.
A slow site isn’t going to please anyone, not least the Google beast.
So in this episode we’re going to revisit the basics.
- What’s the ideal load time
- What makes sites slow
- What tools can you use to test
- What’s the impact of Core web vitals
- And how the heck do you speed up your site?
It also features one of my all time favourite guests, so I’m pretty darn excited.
Buckle your Google belts people, we’re about to get speedy!
Tune in to learn
- Why site speed is so important
- Factors that impact your site performance
- How Google uses Core Web Vitals to look at your site
- Why mobile is so much harder than desktop
- How to improve the quality of your site
- Jono’s top SEO tip
Listen to the podcast
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And big thanks to AGirlFromTheNorthCountry from the United States for their lovely review:
writes:
“10 Stars – Super informative and easy to digest. SEO can be a beast. The bonus is Kate’s wit and melodic voice. Makes me wish we were friends. I learn something new every listen.”
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About Jono Alderson
He’s worked with startups, agencies, and some of the world’s biggest brands to turbo-charge websites, implement growth strategies, prepare for the future, and win markets.
Jono is the Head of SEO at Yoast, where he makes decisions that influence the organic visibility of over 13 million websites across WordPress, Shopify and beyond.
Fun Fact: A decade ago, Jono founded and ran daysoftheyear.com, which lists all of the world’s weird national holidays. It gets 1m+ visitors per month, and Jono is often on “local” radio (in weird timezones and on weird stations) rambling about what day it is.
Connect with Jono Alderson
Useful Resources
- Speedy Website Review Checklist
- GT Metrix
- Google Fiber Speed Test
- Pingdom Website Speed Test
- Cloudflare
- Tiny PNG
Transcript
Kate Toon:
There’s one thing that never gets old when it comes to SEO, and that’s speed. I’d argue it’s one of the most important technical factors. A slow site isn’t going to please anyone, not least the Google beast. So in this episode, we’re going to revisit the basics. What’s the ideal load time? What makes sites slow? What tools can you use to test? What’s the impact of Core Web Vitals? And how the heck do you speed up your site? It also features one of my favourite all-time guests, so I’m pretty darn excited. Buckle your Google belts, people, we’re about to get speedy.
Hello, my name is Kate Toon, and I’m the head chef at the Recipe For SEO Success, an online teaching hub for all things related to search engine optimization and digital marketing. And today I’m talking with Jono Alderson. Hello, Jono.
Jono Alderson:
Hello, Kate. Good evening. You all right?
Kate Toon:
Good evening, good afternoon, and good morning, for it is morning here in the land of the kangaroo.
Jono Alderson:
All of the above.
Kate Toon:
And it is evening there in the land of rain and misery.
Jono Alderson:
Yeah, pretty much. Well, I’m at Yoast HQ in the Netherlands, where it’s actually rainier than it would’ve been in the UK. So I don’t even know why I’ve left the house, to be honest.
Kate Toon:
I know. Well, exactly. I know. So lovely Nijmegen. And we were just talking about that. We’re going to get to see each other in May for YoastCon. Let’s give them a free plug. They’re a good bunch. So if you haven’t heard about YoastCon, it’s a conference running in Nijmegen, which is actually not that far from Amsterdam. I’d never heard of it. And lots of great people speaking on all things SEO. I’m actually talking about conversion copywriting, how to sell with your copy.
Jono Alderson:
Sounds important.
Kate Toon:
It is important, and it’s just a lovely, lovely event, which I enjoy very much. And I’m bringing my child this year, which is exciting. And he’s going to be a volunteer. So anyway-
Jono Alderson:
Or a disaster, we’ll see.
Kate Toon:
Or a moody teenager. But I said, “I hope you’re not going to be a moody teenager.” And he said, “Mum, if anyone’s going to be a moody teenager, it’s going to be you.” And he’s exactly right. So there we go. Anyway, if you don’t know who Jono Alderson is, who are you? Where have you been? He is a digital strategist, marketing technologist and full stack… I don’t really know what that means, but it sounds sexy… Full stack developer. He does really high computers that go on top of-
Jono Alderson:
The top shelf. I’m just really tall.
Kate Toon:
Like those old stereo systems we used to get. He’s an expert in digital strategy, SEO, analytics, WordPress, web performance, structured data, marketing technology, good Lord. Conversion rate, automation growth, PHP, CSS, and yoghourt.
Jono Alderson:
Yes, absolutely. Keep adding interesting things.
Kate Toon:
He’s worked with startups, agencies and some of the world’s biggest brands to turbocharge websites, implement grey strategies, prepare for the future, and win markets. Jono is also the head of SEO at Yoast, where he makes decisions that influence the organic visibility over 13 million websites. Oh my God, the power.
Jono Alderson:
It’s terrifying.
Kate Toon:
WordPress, Shopify and beyond. Fun fact, a decade ago, Jono founded and ran daysoftheyear.com, which lists all the world’s weird national holidays. It gets 1 million visitors per month, and Jono is often on local radio in weird time zones on weird stations, rambling about what day it is. So come on then, what day is it?
Jono Alderson:
It is International Peculiar People Day, which is so apt. Right? Very nice. Celebrate just people who are a bit weird.
Kate Toon:
Oh, I’m going to go and share that on my socials afterwards. It’s our day. It’s our day, Jono.
Jono Alderson:
Yeah. Hey, we’re here. Perfect.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I was hoping it’d be Hedgehog Day or something, but I’ll take it. But it is also Speed Day. Boom boom. Look at that segue. Although segues aren’t particularly fast. So let’s talk about speed. For the listeners at home, let’s hope they’re at home. They could be anywhere. Are you at home listening or are you on the toilet? You could be doing anything. I don’t know. Can you briefly explain why speed and performance are so important? I mean, it’s pretty darn obvious, but yes, let us know.
Jono Alderson:
Yeah, I guess the easiest answer is because all the research shows us that it is. So there are studies after studies, after studies, from all sorts of places and all sorts of different contacts and equitable bodies. And the consensus is every millisecond that you can shave off your website loading means cold, hard cash. And that might be directly in terms of people are likely to spend, or maybe indirectly they’re less likely to get distracted, they’re less likely to get annoyed about other. Whatever it is, milliseconds of money. And however you break it down, whatever you do to analyse it, whatever you test, it comes to the same conclusion again. Yeah. So yeah, that’s pretty much the long and short.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Because SEOs do like to argue about everything. But one of the few things they don’t necessarily argue about speed. As you said, there’s pretty much a consensus that it is important. Then they just argue about how fast is fast? They argue about things like AMP, they argue about things like Core Web Vitals. Is speed one of the things, occasionally they roll John Mueller out on a plinth, and he’s allowed to say something and then he is rolled back in again. Is speed something that Google have actually acknowledged is important?
Jono Alderson:
Yeah, on-goingly, since I think the first mention of it was around 2011, when they first started dabbling with it just for mobile. And then it’s got a bit more important, and a bit more important, and then explicitly a ranking factor. And then more important still. Now as you say, there is no consensus on how important it is. And when pressed, Google say, “Oh, it’s only really a tiebreaker, and it’s probably only really a tiny factor.” But I guess most of their factors are going to be really tiny in the grand scheme of things when you are like, you’ve got black boxes within black boxes making these tiny decisions. And I guess given that most sites are slow and bad and haven’t optimised this, if you’re looking for advantages over your competitors, then maybe this is one of the many tiny things you should do. So yeah, maybe it’s not the most important thing, but may definitely pay attention to.
Kate Toon:
Well, I mean, I think it is one of the most important things. I’d put it up there in my top three. And the reason I love it as well, it’s why we tackle it in the first week of the course, is because it’s relatively easy. So much in SEO is subjective and confusing, and you need a myriad of tools. It’s relatively easy to see how slow your site is and make minor improvements. When you’re getting down to the pointy end of shaving milliseconds, it does get harder and harder. But some people can have massive improvements with the most basic changes. Just taking that 5,000-pixel image off the homepage and squishing it. So I like it because it’s black and white. That’s why I like technical SEO, because it’s not all about “Search your intent.”
Jono Alderson:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Anyway, let’s run through a few things that impact a site’s performance. And I’m going to go back and forth like a little ping pong balls speeding across the table. And I’m going to go first because this is my podcast, sorry. So I’m going to go with hosting.
Jono Alderson:
You go.
Kate Toon:
I’m going to go with hosting. And obviously, if you’re on Squarespace or Shopify, you don’t have much choice about that. They host where they host, and I will say that I’ve seen a massive improvement over the last five years in the speed of the servers for those platforms. If you’re got a self-hosted site, if you’re on WordPress, then you do have a choice. And I think I always choose a host pretty much based on their customer service, and I think that’s quite important. But I also think it’s important to think about where they’re hosting. So I host with a company called SiteGround, and more recently they got some service in Australia, which is where my primary audience is. So if I had to choose, I would put it there. But yes, I think customer service is super-important as well. And as your site’s getting really chunky, you might want to think about not being on a shared server, but going on a dedicated server. Any other advice around hosting, Jono?
Jono Alderson:
Yeah, spend a bit more. You can get hosting for $3, and your site will be slow and it’ll be down half the time. But I think your point was great, which is you can tell you want a hosting company who understands the web, who aren’t just putting somebody else and hosting together, and putting a markup on it. Who have an understanding of your platform. So you said if you’re on WordPress, you probably want a hosting company who has expertise in WordPress, because the way that you might host a WordPress site be different to a different type of technology, different tweaks, different tech. So really finding a company and probably paying a little bit more for it, who have people with names and faces and demonstrable expertise, and a reasonable degree of service and uptime. And you can get hold of them, and you can ask them questions. And they’ll fix things if they break, and they’ll update your technology to the latest stuff. You want a hosting company who gets it, who cares and who aren’t just taking your $3 a month alongside 10,000 other people. So yeah, really invest.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, and I think that’s it. It’s not something to scrimp on. Your website’s probably your most important business tool. So why do you think paying $5 a month for hosting is a good thing? You get what you pay for, as we’d say in England.
Jono Alderson:
And even $20 might be transformative just to go from that “What’s the cheapest?” And maybe what’s two or steps up or so.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, exactly. And you know always pay. If you are on Shopify or Squarespace, you pay a monthly fee. WordPress is on the surface free, but if nothing’s free once you put everything together and add and things. I wanted to make another point there, and it’s gone right out of my brain. Oh, you mentioned about-
Jono Alderson:
Oh, no.
Kate Toon:
It’s very early in the morning. You mentioned about markup and reselling. It’s really important, I think, to say as well, for me, I don’t recommend hosting with your web developer and letting them own your hosting or buy your hosting. You should definitely buy your domain name and your hosting yourself. This is nothing to do with speed. Because if someone owns your domain name and your hosting, they own your website. And if you get fed up with them or piss you off, they can take it with them. And I’ve seen that happen so many times where people hold websites to ransom. And often as you said, they are just reselling someone else’s hosting with a bit of markup on it. So if they’re not doing anything in addition to that, if they’re not offering maintenance and upgrades, and they’re updating your plug-ins and things every month, then think about that. But I would never host with my web developer. I would always choose a third party. It just gives you that little line of separation. Do you know what I mean?
Jono Alderson:
Yeah, definitely. Oh, yeah. Oh, good tip, actually. If you’re on WordPress, in the Tools menu, there’s a Site Health thing, and that does some analysis on how healthy your site is. And some of those are based on your hosting setup. And it will say, “You are running outdated technology, your server’s under resourced.” If you’d like. It’ll catch it if it’s really bad and then you’ll know, “Okay, I really need to go switch. So that’s pretty handy.”
Kate Toon:
Yeah, it is a good little tip. All right, so we’re talking about things that impact site performing. Number one was hosting. What would you say is next?
Jono Alderson:
I want to cheat and steal yours. Images. So often, the images on your pages are probably the biggest bottleneck. They’re also, quite often, the easiest thing to solve, as you said. If you upload a 5,000-megabyte image straight from your phone that you’ve taken on your latest iPhone, that is going to slow your page down and there’s really no way around that. You have to really consider, is this image the right size for the space I want to show it in? Is it the right format? JPEGs are good, but PNGs are better, and there’s a whole bunch of decision Gs around that. But use modern formats and you’ll get halfway there. And then the font size is really important. So a large image is also going to have a large font size. Makes sense. You don’t want to be uploading things that are 300 megabytes. You want to be uploading things which are a hundred kilobytes, maybe at a push.
And generally, that’s about enough to show a high-quality image on a big screen. There are a million tools out there for optimising images. And you just need to make sure that whatever your workflow is, it isn’t “Snap a photo and upload it straight into my webpage.” You put something in between, whether that’s whoosh.app is my favourite, it’s made by a bunch of Googlers. That’s really cool. But it’s a bit manual. You’ve got to go in and tinker. But there are services and plugins and apps, whatever platform you’re on, there’ll be a whole marketplace. And you just need to make sure you’ve got some kind of workflow.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, we’ll put some of those tools into the notes. So I love TinyPNG. It’s basic, but it’s simple.
Jono Alderson:
Yes.
Kate Toon:
Does the job.
Jono Alderson:
That’s really nice.
Kate Toon:
And I think the question that always then rises from that is, “Okay, well, what size should they be?” And it’s hard, because you’re trying to create an image that looks great on a massive iMac, but also renders well on a mobile. So generally, if you Google name of theme, image sizes, often Divvy for example, will give you a whole list of sizes for the different elements. As small as possible is the best advice. But I think it’s also about looking at the complexity of the image. So if you are choosing an image for your homepage, maybe keep it quite simple. I see often e-commerce stores maybe showing their shopfront, which has got millions of different products in it, loads of different layers of colour and whatever. And if you try and smoosh that to any degree, you’re going to lose the quality.
So simple images, or even background colours for that homepage image just to keep that file size down. And then yeah, you can maybe have more complex images elsewhere, because people are engaged now and they’re looking at the content, and they’re actively working through your site. But that first load is so important. We’ll talk about that a little bit with Core Web Vitals, but images.
Jono Alderson:
Yeah, definitely.
Kate Toon:
Massive. And when you’re doing this, take the opportunity to rename your images. Hyphens, not underscores, all of that stuff. Make them keyword-optimised, but not two keyword-optimised, all that. We won’t get into that. We could do a whole other episode on images. Now you talked as well, there was a couple of notes I can see here. Thinking about plugins and themes. What should we consider there both with Shopify and Squarespace, with their apps, and then with WordPress with its plugins?
Jono Alderson:
Yeah, this is really interesting, I think. So the concept is budgeting, which is that everything you add is going to come with a cost. And it’s an oversimplification to say that apps or plugins are bad, and that having lots of flow because some might have some microflow. Some are big, some are small, but generally you’re going to be installing these kinds of things because they’re going to do something. And that’s going to either take processing time for the server, or it’s going to add images in JavaScript that needs to be downloaded by the user, or it’s going to introduce tracking stuff that needs to happen. All of these things come with a cost. And the more these things add, then the more time that’s going to add to your site.
So you need to think from a business perspective, “If I want to add this fancy slider carousel to show off all my products, that might be really good for conversion rate. Might help people get into the site, but it’s going to come with a speed cost. And can I try and quantify whether that’s worth it or not?” And it’s hard to get down to that [inaudible 00:14:57] mountain into maybe testing, you might want to really get into the weeds of using some of the testing tools to see the impact. I’m sure we’ll come on that. But generally, just be aware that every piece of functionality you add comes with a cost that are considered trade-off. Because again, every millisecond going to, down to, there’s some research around if you can shave off 0.1 second of your site, might be able to generate up to a 10% increase in conversion rate, which is obscenely high. So even really little tiny slowdowns can be quite impactful. So it’s worth considering the budget.
Kate Toon:
So you might have heard that Jono sounded a little bit robotic there. We fiddled with our internet connection, and hopefully it’s better. But one of the things that you mentioned there that I just want to reiterate in case it got lost in the glubble glubble, was you said, “Even a, I think it was a 1% increase or decrease in your speed.” What? Say that again. What was that little stat? I loved it.
Jono Alderson:
Yeah, there’s loads of this research, you can go pick your own. But one of the ones that stood out to me was there was some Deloitte research from 2021 where they tested a thousand or so sites in different sectors in different countries, and they found that 0.1-second decrease in load time or increase in speed, depending on how you want to look at, generated up to 10% uplift in either conversion rate or revenue. I forget. But the impact was profound. And-
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Palpable.
Jono Alderson:
You might not get that level, but that’s real and it’s worth looking at.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. And you may not be able to quantify that. I think you mentioned their CSS and JavaScript. For the people who don’t understand, CSS is cascading style sheets, it’s how you make things look a certain way. The colours, the fonts. And JavaScripts, I like to say, is anything that wiggles or jiggles. So it’s your navigation, it’s things like when you roll over and you have this thing called parallax scrolling, and things vlog into the site. 99% of that movement on your site is annoying, unnecessary and slowing your site down. Why does the copy need to come in line by line? It’s actually really frustrating for that to happen. And also, we’ll talk about this again when we get to Core Web Vitals, but a page that’s kind of blank and then things start to load in. It’s actually frustrating from a user experience point of view.
Just show me the content. Don’t go, “Ta-da. Ta-da, ta-da, ta-da.” Just have it all there. And another thing along with that, I think, is thinking about feeds. A lot of my, especially e-commerce clients, they love a good Instagram feed. But to make that appear, your site has to go off to Instagram, make a connection to the server, find your account, grab the images, bring them back. And really, the goal is not to get people from your site to bloody Instagram, the goal is to get them from Instagram to your site. So I often recommend replacing your Instagram feed with a kind of faux feed that looks like an Instagram feed, but is a static choice of your best-ever images.
Jono Alderson:
Yes. Nice.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Nice little tip there. All right, so we’ve talked about file format. Quick thing that I wanted to talk about, which I think a lot of people get confused about, is lazy loading. So it’s a WordPress-specific thing.
Jono Alderson:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Can you explain that to us?
Jono Alderson:
Yeah, so we talked about images, JavaScript and things moving around and carousels. All of that is expensive to load, but it doesn’t mean you can’t have it. The most important thing is, as you said, when a user is watching a page load, and you can see it coming in piece by piece, that’s the frustrating thing. But if you can make that first bit really fast, doesn’t matter if the rest of the page and the stuff that’s lower down and out of view takes a little while to load in. So you can be tactical in how you structure your pages and your content, and how you choose what you want to load in what order. So if you can make the top, immediately visible stuff load super lightning-fast, maybe all your fancy movement and your interactions and your embedded Instagram feed, God forbid, is down further out the way, so that whilst they’re reading your important headlines and your nice full content, all of that can be happening in the background.
Now the last couple of years, you can do that natively in Google Chrome and Safari and other browsers. WordPress does this automatically out the box. Some other platforms do, there are plugins and apps. If not, you can tell the browser, the images or iframes or scripts or other things should be lazy loaded. And the browser just goes, “Yep, I will automatically decide when I’m going to load this, based on where the user is.” And as they start to scroll on their device, they’ll go, “Ooh, we should start loading this image.” So all of that just waits. And you’re not trying to load all of these huge images and resources, you’re just doing the critical top of the top of the screen bit. So it’s that initial view part that’s super-important.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, exactly. And that it might not be something your average DIYer can help with, but a developer will be able to look at that. I think people think sites load top to bottom, and they just don’t. Sometimes the website takes a quick win and goes, “Oh, I’ll just quickly shove this up because it’s small.” And then you see that kind of movement again. We’ll talk about that. So we’re going to come onto some slightly more complex issues in a second, but your favourite tools for speed? I love Pingdom Site Speed, just because of the simplicity of the report. I think it makes it really easy to understand. I like the grading, and I like the fact that it gives you that site speed but also the page size. I try to choose, make sure my homepage is under 1.5, because I think anything over that is going to be problematic. Sometimes you can have larger page sizes, but it does work. And we are looking at about three seconds-ish for load time. So Pingdom Site Speed, I like GTmetrix. What are some of your favourites?
Jono Alderson:
I really like Google’s own toolkit, the main one of which is PageSpeed Insights. And I really like it for a few reasons. One is you get the metrics that Google are using, which come on to, but they really do a tear down of which bits of the page are slow and in which ways, and what might you want to do about that. But the best bit is they give you a report based on real user data. So all of the real humans who visited your website, whether they’re on fast desktop wifi, or so mobile phones in the wilderness, all that data’s collected by Google Chrome and anonymized, and then aggregated. So when you’re looking at how fast is my webpage, you’re not getting some kind of virtual test where they work out, how fast might it be? You’re getting actual, real humans have found that it’s this fast, and this bit’s flat. And that might be very different to what you can test and reproduce on your desktop or your past desktop connection.
So you can get some real insight that you might otherwise miss, which is super-useful. Oh, it turns out, you mentioned earlier you’ve just got some servers in Australia through SiteGround. It might turn out that your site is really fast for you, because your server’s up the road from you, but your visitors from the other side of the world having to wait eight seconds. And maybe you don’t sell to them, but that’s definitely affecting your SEO. It’s definitely affecting those people’s likelihood to recommend you or to think to you, or to retweet yourself. You want to be considering all of these humans as people you want to be serving a fast website to. So it’s really good for that.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I mean, I often find that Pingdom, because as you said, just generating it from test data, not real data, it’s a bit softer, it’s a bit gentler. So I recommend people start with that one, and then look at Page Insights. Because if you go straight to Page Insights, pretty much everyone scores bad. It’s really depressing, and it might feel a bit overwhelming. But one of the things I love about that tool is especially with the images we talked about, it will list out the images and the savings you can make. And that really quick win there that you can do. Some of the other data’s a bit more complicated, and some of the recommendations are a bit advanced. Like using web, I forgot the name, but the special types of images and stuff which aren’t completely browser-compatible. And some of the things might be a bit. So I think start with Pingdom, do what you can there. And then run your site through Page Insights, because it’s a bit more brutal.
Jono Alderson:
For sure. And even more generally, I like that as approach. So much, you are never going to be able to fix everything, and your site is never going to be able to slow instantaneously. I put a lot of time, and mine is now really bloody lightning fast. But there is more could do, but it’s not worth it. So it’s all diminishing returns. And definitely, the secret is find the thing which is currently the slowest and remove that model. I can then start again, reassess. And generally speaking, even the most simple of these tools will say, “Hey, that image is 10 megabytes. Maybe don’t do that.” And when you fix that, you’ll make a world of difference. And then maybe you need to go deeper and get to the next thing. But maybe not.
Kate Toon:
I think that’s a really great point. We’ll come onto the advanced questions in a sec, but I think when we’re doing the course, a lot of the developer types really fall down the rabbit hole of speed. And they’re looking at Google fonts and everything to try and take milliseconds off. And I’m like, “You are already down to 2.5 seconds, that’s pretty great. Maybe your time will be better spent building some backlinks, or doing some outreach, or building a relationship with another partner. Or writing an amazing piece of content.” No one element of SEO is going to solve the problem. And you can go too far with speed, and get a bit obsessed, I think. So, yes.
And I think even for really proficient developers, you do get to the point where you’re frustrated that you can’t do more, but there is no more you can do. Because you’re stripping stuff out that’s actually essential to the user experience. So it’s always a compromise. But let’s talk about mobile SEO and mobile speed. We had Cindy Krum on the website, and she went into a lot of detail if you haven’t listened to that episode, about why results for mobile speed are so much harsher. So you’ll notice if you test on Page Insights, you look at desktop, you get quite a good score. You look at mobile, it’s appalling. And you’re like, “Oh my God.”
Jono Alderson:
Yep.
Kate Toon:
For the newbies listening, why is mobile so much harder than desktop?
Jono Alderson:
There’s a few things that are going to affect that. So the most obvious is the hardware’s different. So chances are your fancy home computer that’s plugged into fancy wifi that has more memory and a better graphics card and more CPU is going to have more firepower. And all of these parts of your computer or your phone are used when a webpage is loading. In order to draw the images and put the pictures in the right place, there’s going to be purchases with your graphics card. In order to ship the bandwidth to your network, stuff’s going to convert. All of these bits of hardware have capacities, and there is less of that on a phone. So you’re bottlenecked and constrained. And then alongside that, you’ve got the network tonight. So you’ve not got a nice fancy wifi, you’ve got a cell tower over there somewhere that needs to ping to another cell tower, and your phone needs to do a whole bunch of negotiations so that it can identify itself so that you don’t get hacked.
All of this takes milliseconds. It’s really, really hard to serve anything faster than 800 milliseconds on a mobile phone, just because the limitations of the speed of light and that your phone has to negotiate with the nearest cell operator, et cetera. All of these are really hard constraints, so it’s always going to be much harder. But then you’ve also got a few other interesting human factors, like the context of people is going to be different. They’re going to be less patient. They might be out and about, they might be doing other things. They have a finger spare to scroll and interact, rather than their master and a full keyboard. So they’re going to have different expectations.
And chances are, unless you’ve built and designed your site in a way that really considers “We’re going to serve a perfect experience to everybody agnostically, regardless of what their device is,” chances are, you’re going to be shipping some big images. And you’re going to have some JavaScript that maybe only really benefits people on desktop. And maybe it’s not the perfectly crafted experience for a device with those constraints and contexts. It’s always going to be harder and you’re always going to be behind, and there isn’t really great solution. You can build mobile first and start from scratch, but that’s much more complex to do well and do right, and have all those conditions. But you can try and do a mobile version of your site, but that’s usually terrible for SEO. And oh, it’s hard.
Kate Toon:
It’s a hard one, isn’t it? Yeah. So hardware-
Jono Alderson:
Strip more stuff.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, hardware network user patience. I love that. And you know it’s pretty obvious that your phone has less computing power. I don’t think that is obvious to a lot of people. I think we have such high expectations, and we’re sold that our iPhones are so amazing that people think that the experience will be exactly the same. And I think that’s a shock to a lot of people, and they’re like, “Oh yeah, it’s just a phone. And it’s this big, so maybe it’s not as speedy, doesn’t have the processing power of a giant computer.” So I love that.
Jono Alderson:
And you’ve probably got a fancy phone, but your audience maybe doesn’t. Your audience is maybe still on the iPhone 6, whatever.
Kate Toon:
My mum and dad have got a Nokia. They’re still on the Nokias, so.
Jono Alderson:
Ouch.
Kate Toon:
And I like as well, so we talk about mobile first. And for those who don’t know, that just means that when you are building, you build from a mobile perspective first. Also, that also refers to the fact that Google is mobile first. So it’s looking at your mobile site probably more or if not exclusively, than your desktop. And I think in the olden days, you would see, “Do you want to go to our mobile site?” And you’d go to an Atari version of the website. And now people don’t do that. They have what are called responsive sites, which are supposed to change depending on the device viewing them. And you buy themes and designs that are supposed to be responsive, but when you actually look at them, often they’re not that great.
And it can just be a case of just going into your settings and turning off fancy graphics for mobile, and really just stripping it back. Now we used to have something called AMP. I mean, we still have AMP. And AMP was accelerated mobile processing, and it was tending towards news and magaziney sites where that you don’t need a lot of graphics and wiggly JavaScripts. What’s the status of AMP these day? It was all the rage. You know the way Google likes to bring things out and go, “Everyone do this,” and then later on go, “We’re not doing it anymore.” Where are we at with AMP?
Jono Alderson:
Yeah, some of those, pretty much that. I think I’m the last surviving member of the AMP advisory committee, so I’ve got a vested interest in still trying to promote it. Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Have you got a hat that you have to wear when you’re on that committee?
Jono Alderson:
No, I wish. Yeah, no, certainly not. No, they’ve given me nothing other than Strat. No, I love the idea of AMP to format. They’re like, “We will fix the mobile web by creating a set of frameworks that make it impossible to build things that are slow.” Now okay, that’s really cool. We’ll define and manage this governance, but really nice. Google really mismanaged it, whole bunch of politics and mess around it. The SEO industry hated it because they hate to be told what to do, and hate to be told that they don’t know what they’re doing, even though all the evidence suggested that’s true. Show me a fast website anywhere and I will forgive them, but no such thing exists. Yeah, I’ve got my site on AMP still, JonoAlderson.com is running AMP on WordPress. That was about two clicks to set up. It’s super lightning-fast. There are some constraints. I can’t show annoying popups because they’re slow. Won’t let me because they’re slow. So you make some interesting trade-offs from a business perspective. I’ve had it. It just never got the adoption.
Kate Toon:
So Google kind of sort of gently locked AMP in a cupboard, and we never talked about them again, but it did-
Jono Alderson:
Yes.
Kate Toon:
It introduced its new sexy friend, Core Web Vitals. So I just want to quickly, we’ve talked about this on the podcast before.
Jono Alderson:
Yes.
Kate Toon:
But I want to do a brief summary, and then I’m going to hand over to Jono. So Core Web Vitals is, yes, it’s about speed, but it’s also about user experience and thinking about how your site loads. We’ve talked about this with lazy loading and big images. So it has a few different metrics, and they give them really the most terrible names. Someone honestly, the first is FCP, First Contentful Paint. I mean, seriously. And then we also have CLS, Cumulative Layout Shift, and FID, First Input Delay. So First Contentful Paint really is about stuff that loads at the top of your website. What’s the big thing that loads, how long does it take? Does it take ages to load?
Cumulative Layout Shift is that thing where you see a site loading and you’re about to click on something, then everything jiggles and moves down a bit because something’s loaded in the middle. And that’s often as you said, because the browser’s going, “Oh, we’ll load the images. Ah, now we’ll load the framework so all the images are going to move.” And then we have First Input Delay, which is really about how quickly can you interact with the site? How quickly can you click on buttons and enter things in fields? And often again, that’s to do with the JavaScript loading that makes the fields work. So you can now do these tests in Google Search Console and in various other tools. But for the layperson, good Core Web Vitals just seems terrifying. I mean, we had speed, we understood that we needed to reduce our images and all that kind of stuff. How does Core Web Vitals change the speed game really for people? Or does it?
Jono Alderson:
Yeah, I think it really does. I think for a long, long time we didn’t really have a standard way of measuring and defining speed. We have things like, you mentioned webpage test that gives you three seconds. And you’re like, “Well, is three seconds good or bad? What do I need to do about that? How much money and time should I spend on this?” And I don’t really know. And now what changes is Google comes out and says, “Actually, here’s some very specific technical measures which you can measure repeatedly and compare to your competitors, and get real user data for, and go look at your competitor’s data.” And then we have a whole bunch of research that says, “Fixing these makes you more money, and we’re going to make my ranking faster.”
So now everybody goes, “Okay crap, yeah, I’m going to go and improve these things. I’m going to invest in them.” And everybody’s website gets a bit faster, Google’s happy, et cetera. They are complex, and they are quite specific technical. And for most people, I think webpage tests are similar and going, “Can I get from five seconds to three seconds?” is probably enough. But when you get beyond that and you go, “Okay, crap, I really need to actively compete against my competitors. I need to be faster than them. I want to squeeze more value and conversion out my users,” this is how you then get to that next step. You go, “Speed is not just a number of seconds, it’s a complex thing that’s made of lots of parts, and this is the best way we have to mature it.” I think what’s quite interesting about Core Vitals is it’s a moving target in a few ways. So they continually change the past threshold on these metrics as the internet changes and gets faster, because user expectations increase.
So if your competitors are making their websites faster than you are making yours faster, yours is slower. And you’re going to lose over time, which is interesting. But they’re also introducing new Core Web Vital metrics. So there’s one, I forget what it’s called. There was a new one recently, which is essentially, how smoothly does your website load? I’m like, “I have no idea. I’ve never measured that, but now I will. And if it’s less smooth than my competitors, I’ve got a problem.” When you load something and it’s trying to do too much at once, and you scroll your mouse, and it goes, “Ah.” That’s nasty, that’s bad. And there’s more coming. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s going to measure host load interactions. So if I try and load a video, does it block up the rest of the page? All sorts of these types of things.
So it’s a really nice way to start to break these down into achievable chunks. And all of these, when you run these reports, it gives you advice specific to each one. So it will say, “You have a problem with Cumulative Layout Shift. It is because this advert loads in and moves everything else down the page, and that’s horrible. Here is the thing you can fix.” And generally, they’ll go, “And here’s a bunch of documentation you can throw your developer, and tell them they’re an idiot.” It’s really nice. And yeah, it’s conflict on the surface, but as you click through it, they tailor it to your site and say, “Here is the problem, here is the description of what’s going on, here’s resources.” Yeah. Keeps going.
Kate Toon:
And I think it’s common sense. So when any of these new things come out, obviously I’m like, “Ugh.” My finger clenches at the horror because I have to update so much in my course. But when this one came out I was like, “Oh no, no, I’m good.” Because I’ve already been talking about the top image, and you’re not using sliders and thinking about JavaScripts. And if you’ve already been considering the user experience and speed, you’re probably okay.
Jono Alderson:
Yes.
Kate Toon:
And you just might need to do a bit of tweaking. Now, we’ve talked about some big issues, but I just want to finish the episode with some of the smaller things that we can fix. We talked about images, we talked about hosting, we’ve talked about JavaScript, CSS, mobile SEO and Core Web Vitals. You touched there on videos. I think videos are a tricky one.
So you’d always host your videos on a third party such as Vimeo or YouTube, second-biggest search engine. But even pulling those in as embeds will slow your site down. So again, another thing I do, which is slightly cheaty, is I create a thumbnail that looks like a YouTube thumbnail. You click on that, and then the video launches. Because people will be a bit more patient if they’ve actively chosen to watch a video. But if you have a video, for example, above the fold as the first element and it’s auto-playing, that can be really problematic from a speed point of view. So that’s video. Let’s talk about some other things like caching and CloudFlare and content delivery networks. Talk the three-
Jono Alderson:
Fancy fun things.
Kate Toon:
Yes.
Jono Alderson:
I mean, I will, but I’ll half-back first. You mentioned fonts earlier, which I want to touch on as well. Google Fonts is the devil. Google Fonts is one of the most common issues I see with sites. To your point on video now, you’re loading a resource from another domain, which is going to require all sorts of connectiony, bandwidthy, service stuff to happen, which is going to be slow unavoidably. You are reaching privacy issues because you are leaking your user’s IP addresses to Google Fonts, which may or may not be illegal, based on which part of Europe you might or might not be in. But then all of that has to load, it’s got to reload the text on the screen. You’re going to get this horrible loading jack. If you can avoid using Google Fonts, that’s probably one of your biggest wins. You can serve and host your fonts locally.
If you still want to use custom fonts, you can do that very quickly. The secret to a lot of this and shortcutting it, you mentioned CloudFlare. I do not get paid by them, but I damn well should. CloudFlare is magic. They’re a content delivery network of which there are many different brands and many different types. They are essentially just a thing that sits in front of your website. So when you type in example.com rather than directly there, you go through CloudFlare. They have a free product, they have various tiers, but the free one will give you most of what you need. Takes 10 minutes to set up.
And because your users are rooting through their system, they can go, “Oh, well, while they’re here, we will convert that JPEG into a PNG. And we will strip out some of the unnecessary JavaScript. And we will make sure that we are using the most modern standards for communicating between the user and the stuff” and a thousand other things. All of which you possibly could do yourself or your developer could. But it’ll take a year, and you’ve got other stuff to do. All of which will tie almost directly to the Core Web Vitals stuff, many of which are gruelling. You don’t really want to go through and manually convert image formats for all of your images, because you have lots of them and it’s tedious. If you’ve never done anything and if you’re not using CloudFlare, they will get you from zero to 80% in 30 minutes for $0. That’s a no-brainer.
Kate Toon:
I want to stop you there, because I want to ask about this. Because it comes up it a lot, CloudFlare. And a lot of people go, “Oh, is that right for my site? That seems like something a big site would do. Is it right for my little small business site?” And it does sound complicated. Where does it fit in? It’s not hosting, what is Cloud? Can you just explain it in more detail, what is CloudFlare? Is it a software? Is it hosting? What is it? Is it magic?
Jono Alderson:
It’s infrastructure. It’s not magic. Yeah, no, it’s infrastructure. So they have a whole bunch of servers all around the world. And you mentioned earlier you should definitely get your hosting near to where your consumers are. And the thing that CloudFlare does is they have servers everywhere, and they’re super-charged and they all connect you and talk to each other. So that regardless of where anyone is, as soon as they type in your website, they connect to a CloudFlare server and then that passes back to your server.
So they sit in the middle. But they do that in a way that speeds everything up magically, and they take copies of everything, and they serve it ugly. If your website gets 10 visitors a month, it is probably skill worth doing. Even if you only serve people in the country and you’re not fussed about people on the other side of the world, it’s still worth it. They will solve a whole bunch of the speed problems you didn’t even know you had. And most of their config stuff is written in plain English. And you turn it on with a check box. You go, “Do you want to make your JavaScript smaller? Yes.” And you go and you-
Kate Toon:
No, I want it bigger. I want it bigger. I want bigger JavaScript.
Jono Alderson:
More JavaScript.
Kate Toon:
More. Bring me more.
Jono Alderson:
Yeah, it’s just great.
Kate Toon:
Okay, fantastic. All right, well, look, I think we also can quickly touch on popups. So we know that pop-ups slow sites down and that Google has their intrusive interstitial vibe going on, but they are also a powerful way of gathering content. So again, compromise. What about ads? Because ads can be super-problematic.
Jono Alderson:
Ads are really hard. They are designed to load quickly and intrusively, and at the cost of everything else. They also, depending on how they’re implemented, might move all your content around as they’re loading. They probably throw a bunch of Javascript. They definitely connect to a thousand third-party domains and [inaudible 00:40:16] TSS. It is very, very hard to make a fast site with ads. There are some tactics you can use, all of which come with compromises. So you could defer and lazy-load your adverts. You could say, “Don’t start loading my adverts until all of my content on my page is loaded.” And that will be a great user experience and you will half your ad revenue, because all of your ad revenue is based on shoving the ads in the way. You can definitely make sure that your theme and your layout anticipates where ads are going to load.
And they don’t do that horrible layout shift thing, so you know that there’s one is going to pop in here. Don’t let the browser discover that halfway through and jackal your content around go, “Okay, I’m going to put a placeholder in.” Very simple techniques in CSS and CMR to do that. Any competent developer should be able to manage it. You can maybe, if we’re lucky, be in a position to choose which ad partners and networks you use. So a lot of people will just use AdSense, but there are networks of vendors and solutions, some of which are better than others. And generally, the ones who get it will advertise that they have considerations for Core Vitals. They will use terms like “Cumulative Layout Shift” and “Core Web Vitals” in their marketing messaging and on their websites. Platforms like Zoic are probably a good first step up from AdSense, and then there are many others. But yeah, have a go shopping around in the same way you would with your hosting. There are options, and some of them are better than others.
Kate Toon:
Fantastic. But I guess when it comes to speed, it’s always a compromise. You can have a super-fast site that might be ugly as all hell and not convert. And also, you need to be careful not to fall down the rabbit hole of trying to shave off one millisecond, and do that at the expense of doing other SEO tactics, which could be more. And I think you talked a lot about user frustration and user enjoyment. The way that we have the feed on our homepage, or the way that we handle speed on other pages. It depends where people are on the user journey, and whether they’re right at the bottom of your funnel and they’re super-engaged and they’re enjoying the content. Often, people say to me about my blog posts, “Why’d you put all those Giphys in? Because it slows things down.” I’m like, “Yeah, it does. But I like them.” And as long as I’m happy, I don’t care if my customers are happy.
Jono Alderson:
It’s a trade-off.
Kate Toon:
It’s a trade off, it’s a trade off. They look cool, they’re fun. So it’s always a trade-off. Jono, let’s finish up with one final tip. If there’s one thing, we’ve talked about a lot today, but if people could take one step after this podcast to improve their speed, what do you think would be the best step for them?
Jono Alderson:
I’m going to cheat and give you two. The easy one is CloudFlare. Go do CloudFlare, because it’ll solve a bunch of these problems and tick all the boxes. And then if stuff breaks, take a step back. But the second tip, stealing from you again. You said you don’t worry about this stuff and updating your documentation. And of course, it’s because it’s so closely aligned with the user experience. I would think about it in that way. Don’t think about speed. Think about quality, think about user experience, think about accessibility. Those are the things that Google is trying to measure. And if you have a vested interest and you invest in saying, “How do we make using this page feel good, not feel frustrating, not annoy or confuse people?” Then you’re going to be on the right track regardless of how these metrics change, and regardless of what happens and regardless of the evolving landscape. That’s what Google’s trying to simulate and here. So yeah, don’t worry too much about the specific metrics, just make stuff good.
Kate Toon:
Make stuff good. I love that, Jono. Well, thank you so much for coming along today, coming back on the podcast. It’s always a pleasure. I will ask you again. I’m just going to keep asking you until you get sick of this.
Jono Alderson:
Damn it.
Kate Toon:
Damn it. And what a wonderful way to celebrate Peculiar People Day with one of the most peculiar people I know.
Jono Alderson:
Oh, thank you.
Kate Toon:
Oh, that is a compliment. You may not seem like it, but it really is. And obviously, we can find out more about you via the Yoast site, but where are you on Twitter and things like that? What’s your Twitter?
Jono Alderson:
Yeah, I’m still on Twitter at Jono Alderson. I’ve not fallen for Mastodon yet. I’m going to hold out and see if I can outlast Elon.
Kate Toon:
Okay, fantastic. And are you are an active LinkedIn? But I’m finding a lot of people, John Mueller, for example, has moved onto LinkedIn and is using that a lot more. Are you a LinkedIn beast?
Jono Alderson:
Yeah, I’m over there. I think I’m at Jono.Alderson or something. Yeah, I should be findable there. If you can’t find me on LinkedIn, I’m not a great SEO, so-
Kate Toon:
Yeah, well, I’ll add a link to him in the show notes just in case he’s not that fine. He’s not that good at SEO. Bless him.
Jono Alderson:
Don’t tell people that.
Kate Toon:
No, I’m joking. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Jono.
Jono Alderson:
Thank you. What an absolute pleasure. See you again at the next one.
Kate Toon:
Woohoo.
So that’s the end of this week’s show. If you have questions about site speed and performance, head to my I Love SEO Group on Facebook and I can help you there. Also, if you haven’t already, be sure to download my free Ultimate SEO Checklist to help manage your site, improve your speed, and grapple the Google Beast. You can find it in the show notes. But first, well, not first. Finally, I want to give a shout-out to one of my lovely listeners. And it’s a girl from the North Country, from the United States. And she writes, “10 stars, super-informative and easy to digest. SEO can be a beast.” I so agree. “The bonus is Kate’s wit and melodic voice.” Do I have a melodic voice? Oh, thank you very much. Makes me wish we were friends. We are friends. It’s official. “I learn something new every listen.”
And hey, look, I just want to apologise. I know that the audio is a little bit muffled on that podcast. I do do my best to make it as good as possible, and my fabulous editor James fiddles with it, but sometimes the internet is just the internet. So bear with me. If you had any difficulty understanding, we do have a full transcript in the show notes, and as well as links to all the tools that Jono and I mentioned. If you like the show, then please feel free to leave a rating. We are running out of ratings and reviews, and we’d love some new ones. You’ll get a shout-out on the show. And that’s it for this week. So until next time, happy SEOing.
