Slide deck from my Brighton SEO presentation on 22nd April 2016.

1. Site Speed for Content Marketers
Tom Bennet. Senior SEO Consultant.
tom@builtvisible.com tomcbennet

2. Why does site speed matter?

3. Just ask your users…

4. Every 1 second of improvement
=
Up to a 2% conversion increase.
Source: https://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2010/04/05/firefox-page-load-speed-%E2%80%93-part-ii/
Source: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/speed-is-key-optimize-your-mobile-experience.html
Reduced page load time by 2.2 seconds
=
Downloads increased by 15.4%
(10 million+ downloads per year)

5. 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)
Source: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

6. What can I do about it?

7. “80-90% of the end-user response time
is spent on the frontend. Start there.”
- Steve Souders

8. Page Size
Source: http://httparchive.org/interesting.php
Total: 2.3mb

9. (Almost) Live Demo

12. Yahoo YSlow + Google PageSpeed rulesets

14. Images

16. 680px
1024px
JPEG, 95%
680px
1024px
PNG

17. Original
Image
Optimization

18. 1) Format & Compression– JPEG for photos, PNG for images with
fewer colours / transparency. Balance file size & aesthetics.
2) Dimensions – What is the maximum width and height at which
the image will be displayed?
3) Replacements – “The fastest HTTP request is the one not made.”
Aim to use fonts for text, vector graphics for logos and shapes, and
CSS effects (shadows, gradients, etc.) wherever possible.
Images: Things to Consider
Read more: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/image-optimization

19. Fonts

23. Icon Font
(93kb – 166kb)
Inline SVG
(~1kb)

24. Read more: https://css-tricks.com/icon-fonts-vs-svg/

25. Original
Image
Optimization
Font
Optimization

26. Fonts: Things to Consider
Read more: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/webfont-optimization
1) Typefaces, Weights, Styles – How many are necessary? Weigh
aesthetics against added requests.
2) Hosting – By using externally hosted fonts (such as Google
Fonts or Typekit), there is a greater chance your visitor will
already have the file cached.

27. Scripts & Stylesheets

29. jQuery 2.x has the same API as jQuery 1.x,
but does not support Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8.
253kb
84kb

30. Read more: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/optimize-encoding-
and-transfer

31. Original
Image
Optimization
Font
Optimization
Script
Minification

32. Scripts: Things to Consider
1) Unnecessary scripts – Clunky social sharing plugins, etc.
2) Minify + concatenate – Make this a part of your build process.
Don’t use development versions of scripts on live site.
3) Caching – Calling popular scripts like jQuery from a CDN
increases chances of caching.
4) Placement – Investigate your critical rendering path.
Read more: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/critical-rendering-path/adding-interactivity-with-
javascript

33. Gzip

34. Read more: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/optimize-
encoding-and-transfer#text-compression-with-gzip
Instructions - Apache, Nginx, IIS.
bootstrap-3.1.1.min.css
98 KB gzip 17 KB
83% saving

35. Original
Image
Optimization
Font
Optimization
Script
Minification
Gzip

37. What about mobile?

38. 1024px640px
1920px

39. Read more: https://builtvisible.com/responsive-images-for-busy-people-a-quick-primer/
WordPress: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2015/11/10/responsive-images-in-wordpress-4-4/
Responsive images with srcset

40. Original
version
Optimized
version
Mobile
version
(responsive
images)

41. Challenges

42. “Performance more often comes down to a cultural
challenge, rather than simply a technical one.”
- Lara Hogan
On culture: http://designingforperformance.com/changing-culture/

43. Prefetch / prerender – Do your users follow
predictable navigation paths?

44. Tip of the iceberg…

45. Thank you.
Tom Bennet. Senior SEO Consultant.
tom@builtvisible.com tomcbennet