Home » Archives for 2015

Case Study: PPC Optimization

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a good complement to natural promotion of websites to deliver leads on demand. PPC can be costly, however, compared to natural promotion (see this Case Study for details). This article shows how to squeeze more out of your PPC spend to boost leads and reduce costs.

Read more

Optimizing a Complex Site for Pagespeed II

In Part I of this series on optimizing websites for Pagespeed we optimized a complex site using mod_pagespeed, some manual tweaks and WPOptimize Speed by xTraffic. We boosted the mobile Pagespeed score from 58/100 to 86/100, and the desktop score from 75/100 to 93/100. In Part II of this series we’ll explore how to speed optimize the server response of a WordPress site with caching plug-ins.

Read more

Optimizing a Complex Site for Pagespeed

With Google and other search engines factoring speed into desktop and mobile search rankings, speed is essential in website design. Google reports on speed metrics in Google Analytics and probably uses some combination of its Speed Index and Pagespeed Insights score. This article shows how we used mod_pagespeed, a speed plug-in, and some manual optimization to improve the Pagespeed score of a complex website.

Read more

Google adds Mobile Responsive Ranking Factor

Google has been preaching the benefits of fast and mobile friendly sites for some time now. With the percentage of users coming to websites on mobile devices increasing, having a mobile-friendly site is a must. As of April 21, 2015, Google will use mobile responsiveness as a signal in their ranking algorithm.

Read more

Case Study: WordPress Theme Optimization

WordPress is the most popular CMS on the Web, with over 60 million users (Wikipedia 2015). WordPress websites use themes to control their look and feel and display the underlying content in the database. Designers can choose from thousands of free or paid themes, or create their own with the requisite skill. Themes come in all shapes and sizes, and therein lies the problem. This article shows the importance of choosing a lightweight theme for faster performance.

Read more

Empirical Study of Web Site Speed on Search Engine Rankings – website performance and seo rankings

Having search engine visibility is critical for website success. Search visibility is due to many ranking factors, including speed. Until recently the effects of website performance on rankings have been poorly understood. This article summarizes an empirical study of web site load times on search rankings. The study found that website crawl time and its variability correlates with search ranking position.

Read more