During our second SEO webinar lesson, we spoke about the importance of site speed. We ran through an explanation of the Google Page Speed insights tool and how to take care of the most common optimizations the tool sugests to site oweners.

1. 2016 SEO Best Practice Series:
Lesson 2 - Page Speed Optimizaiton
Join us again for lesson 3 on July 19th!
Register Here: http://bit.ly/1VIlLCD

2. Agenda
Quick Lesson 1 Recap
Why Focus on Speed?
Areas to Optimize
Questions

3. Quick Recap From Lesson 1
3
Win at SEO by focusing on your users and the
outcome you want them to take on your pages.

4. Why Does Page Speed Matter?
4
Source: https://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2010/04/05/firefox-page-load-speed-%E2%80%93-part-ii/
Source: http://www.slideshare.net/devonauerswald/walmart-pagespeedslide
Source: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/speed-is-key-optimize-your-mobile-experience.html
Every 1 second faster meant up to a 2% conversion increase!
Reduced load time by 2.2 seconds and increased downloads by 15.4%!
(10 million+ downloads per year)
"When your site or app is clumsy or slow, 29% of
smartphone users will immediately switch to another site
or app."

5. If you build it they will come.
If you build it slow, they won’t stay.

6. Speed Is A Ranking Signal!
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-
speed-in-web-search-ranking.html
6
“Today we're including a new signal in our
search ranking algorithms: Site Speed. Like
us, our users place a lot of value in speed.
We use a variety of sources to determine the
speed of a site relative to other sites.”
April 2010

7. 7
Speed On Mobile Will Be A Ranking Signal Soon!
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https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/
http://searchengineland.com/google-
says-page-speed-ranking-factor-use-
mobile-page-speed-mobile-sites-
upcoming-months-250874

8. Checking Speed: Gtmetrix Page Time
https://gtmetrix.com/
8
Learn how long your load time is in seconds and
which optimizations GTMetrix prioritizes.
Check out your waterfall view to see if there are
any page elements that are blocking other parts
of your site from loading.
Page Load Time Rule of Thumb: Try
to keep this under 3 seconds.

9. Google Page Speed Insights
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
9
Google will show your page speed
optimization scores out of 100 for both
desktop and mobile. Think of this score as
how well optimized for speed your page is
rather than how quickly it loads.
In the should fix or consider fixing
sections, which optimizations are
coming from your own domain?

10. Let’s get your page speed
score!
Go to https://goo.gl/J31mP9
and type in your domain.

11. Areas To Optimize For Speed

12. Which Web Server and CMS?
Builtwith.com
12
Web Server
• Is the webserver nginx, apache, or IIS?
CMS
• Is our site built on WordPress or another
platform? Is it built from scratch?

13. Web Server Type
Builtwith.com
13
Most likely your web server is Apache, ngix, or IIS.

14. CMS Type
Builtwith.com
14
There is a good chance you also use WordPress.

15. GZIP Compression
https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/perfo
rmance/optimizing-content-efficiency/optimize-
encoding-and-transfer?hl=en#text-compression-with-
gzip
15
Gzip is a method of compressing files which
can help with transferring them faster to your
browser.
It is also a file format which works similar to
a zip file you would send or receive in an
email.

16. Images
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
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Large images can slow your site down! An
easy way to compress images without losing
the images quality is to compress them.
We recommend using https://compressor.io/
for this.
Compress your image and upload it back to
your site.

17. Fonts
https://www.google.com/fonts/
17
Fonts can take a long time to load.
Google has made a resource which will let
you select exactly which font typefaces,
styles and weights you need.
Google.com/fonts to begin using it.
Consider
Typefaces, Weights, Styles – How many are
necessary?
Hosting – By using externally hosted fonts,
there is a greater chance your visitor will
already have the file cached.

18. Minify Files
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
18
JS, CSS, and HTML contain white space for
people to read them a little easier. However,
browsers don’t need the extra spaces.
To save on character count, you can minify
all of these file types.
http://minifycode.com/ can minify all three
filetypes.

19. Leverage Browser Caching (on Apache)
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
19
In the example we can see that their png
images are not cached with a long enough
expiration. This means that visitors who
come back later will be forced to download
these images again. Why not make it quick
for them?
You can control file extension expirations in
the .htaccess file on apache like this. This
code sets the expiration to one week.
<FilesMatch ".(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|pdf|css|js)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800,
public"
</FilesMatch>

20. Wordpress Guide For Site Speed
https://gtmetrix.com/wordpress-optimization-guide.html
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Gtmetrix has an excellent guide for
optimizing your WordPress site for site
speed.

21. Resources Recap: For Learning Where We Stand
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1. Get your desktop and mobile page speed scores!
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ or
https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/
2. Learn your site’s actual load time in seconds. https://gtmetrix.com/
3. Learn which CMS and web server type your site is built with.
http://builtwith.com/.
Let’s begin with speed optimizations! First, you’ll need to know a few details about your site.

22. Any Questions?

23. Please Join Us Again On 7/19/16!
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We will continue our series going more in depth
with lesson 3 of our SEO webinar series course.
In our next lesson we are going to cover the
Google Search Console!
Sign up now!
http://bit.ly/1VIlLCD