The ultimate product of online marketing efforts are leads. Traffic and rankings are nice, but calls and emails are what drive more customers from websites. This article shows how call tracking can help optimize your marketing budget to maximize leads and minimize overall cost.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Case Study: Responsive Design of PhillyDentistry.com Results
Last time we tested the performance of a responsive redesign of PhillyDentistry.com. The new home page design was nearly twice as fast to load. In Part II of this series, we’ll explore the effects of the responsive design on other important metrics.
Case Study: PhillyDensitry.com Responsive Redesign
Previously we explored the effects of a responsive design on PhiladelphiaOrthodontists.com. We found mobile traffic increased from 20% to 24% after the redesign. This time we look at another responsive redesign, PhillyDentistry.com. In part I, we’ll explore the speed improvements of the new design. In Part II we’ll explore other improvements.
Velocity NYC Contest: Free Pass Giveaway
We’ve teamed up with O’Reilly to offer our readers a chance to win a free pass to the next Velocity conference in New York City.
Beware HTTP Redirects for SEO and Performance – carefully use URL redirection for SEO and web performance
HTTP redirects or URL forwarding is a technique for redirecting one URL to another. Often used for avoiding broken links in new sites, or abbreviating URLs, HTTP redirects are a convenient way to preserve traffic and avoid 404 errors. Used incorrectly, however, redirects can cause SEO and performance issues.
Install Mod_Pagespeed – improve website speed automatically testing mod_pagespeed
Google’s mod_pagespeed is an open source Apache module that automatically applies best practice performance rules to web pages and their associated objects. Mod_pagespeed has more than 40 available optimization filters, including image optimization, CSS and JavaScript concatenation, minification, caching, sharding, deferring JavaScript and more. While mod_pagespeed won’t solve all performance problems, it will trim the fat from unminified text files and graphics, and reduce HTTP requests. This article tests the effect of mod_pagespeed on an example site.