Speed matters. Customers expect your web site to load in 2 seconds or less. 40% of them will abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds. In this presentation, you'll find out why speed makes a difference for SEO and how it impacts the user experience. Included are business case data, links to free tools, and everything you need to get started on improving your site speed/performance today to drive better results in organic search engine optimization. Find out how REI cut their Google crawl time in half while producing a 100% increase in the amount of pages crawled by Google. PLEASE DOWNLOAD the slide deck to see detailed speakers notes containing much more information! You can learn more about Jonathon Colman at http://www.jonathoncolman.org/

1. Site Speed: The Ultimate
UX Feature… for SEO

2. Site Speed:
The Ultimate UX
Feature… for SEO
A case study on how to increase search
engine crawling and online conversion
Jonathon Colman
In-House SEO at REI
Twitter @jcolman

4. Why Speed Matters to You [ 1|4 ]
Customers expect your web site to
load in 2 seconds or less.
40% of them will abandon a site
that takes longer than 3 seconds.
Source: Forrester/Akamai [via GetElastic]

5. Why Speed Matters to You [ 2|4 ]
For every 1 second of load time,
online conversion drops by 7%
and overall customer satisfaction
drops by 16%.
Source: Strangeloop

6. Why Speed Matters to You [ 3|4 ]
Google uses speed as an organic
search ranking factor for the top
1% of competitive queries.
Sources: Google, Matt Cutts [via Search Engine Land]

7. Why Speed Matters to You [ 4|4 ]
A faster site reduces the costs of
both infrastructure and releases
by 50% or more.
Source: Shopzilla [via O’Reilly]

8. Why Speed Matters to Your Users
“ When [web sites] are fast, you feel
good. What that ultimately comes
down to is that you feel in control.
That feeling… translates
“
to happiness.
— Matt Mullenweg
Co-founder of Wordpress
Source: Improving Performance in Mature Web Apps
2009 Velocity Conference

9. • Leverage browser caching
• Leverage proxy caching
• Cache non-changing files:
• JavaScript
• CSS
• Banner images
Step #1: Optimize Caching
Source: Google Code – Web Performance Best Practices
Photo © Flickr user Purplemattfish: flickr.com/photos/purplemattfish/3020016417/

10. • Minimize DNS lookups
• Minimize redirects
• Avoid bad requests
• Combine external JavaScript
• Combine external CSS
• Combine images w/ CSS sprites
• Optimize order of styles, scripts
• Avoid document.write
• Avoid CSS @import
Step #2: Minimize Round-Trip Times
Source: Google Code – Web Performance Best Practices
Photo © Flickr user Batigolix: flickr.com/photos/batigolix/3551295473/

11. • Enable compression
• Remove unused CSS
• Minify JavaScript, CSS
• Minify HTML
• Defer loading of JavaScript
• Optimize images
• Serve scaled images
Step #3: Minimize Payload Size
Source: Google Code – Web Performance Best Practices
Photo © Flickr user Remi Longva: flickr.com/photos/remilongva/4387118403/

12. • Use efficient CSS selectors
• Avoid CSS expressions
• Put CSS in the document head
• Specify image dimensions
• Specify a character set
Step #4: Optimize Browser Rendering
Source: Google Code – Web Performance Best Practices
Screenshot taken by Wikipedia user Korodzik: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NCSA_Mosaic.PNG

13. The Results: Crawl Time/Page
A 50%decrease in the time it took
for Google to crawl an average page.
Source: Google Webmaster Tools – Crawl stats report

14. The Results: Page Crawl Volume
A 100% increase in the amount of
total pages Google crawled per day.
Source: Google Webmaster Tools – Crawl stats report

15. The Results: Site Performance
An 0.5 second savings in page load time.
Source: Google Webmaster Tools – Site performance report [data formatted off-line in Excel]

16. The Results: Conversion Rate
Correlating, significant increases
in our average conversion rate
Source: In-house web analytics reporting Photo © Flickr user Largeprime: flickr.com/photos/largeprimenumber

17. Get Started Now with Free Tools
 Review site speed best practices by Yahoo and Google
 See the Google Webmaster Tools site performance report
 Learn how to get your site speed data in Google Analytics
 Use Google’s Page Speed Online tool, Chrome extension
 Use the YSlow extension for Firefox, Chrome
 Try out the WebPageTest or Pingdom test suites

18. Thank You!
Jonathon Colman
In-House SEO for REI
Home: about.me/jcolman
Twitter: @jcolman
E-mail: jcolman@rei.com