More Isn't Always Better: Business and Social Media

Whether you're a company or a consumer, it's hard to ignore the trend of businesses' whole-heartedly embracing the emergence and presence of social media. Commercials aired on television by businesses encourage customers to "Like" and follow them on Facebook and Twitter, to check them out on Instagram, and follow their Pinterest accounts. Website optimization, website speed optimization, and social media presence have become very important for businesses and marketing. By now, you can find accounts by companies on every form of social media site out there, and customers can be directed to company websites and more.

Top 8 Reasons Your Conversion Rate Isn't Optimized

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is critical to increasing sales and online revenue. It is estimated that 97 percent of website visitors are never ready to make a purchase. So, to achieve your online marketing goals, you must optimize your visitors’ online experience in order to turn these users into business leads or paying customers. But how do you do it?

Search Phrases and Increased Site Visibility

Site visibility is an important component of online marketing, for web-based businesses as well as traditional, brick-and-mortar operations that want to expand their customer base. One of the main reasons why websites have to optimize with enhanced navigability, useful content, and eye-catching graphics is so that more users are directed to the site through user interaction. The site will gain favorable rankings by search engines and increase its site exposure, which could bring in more customers and increase sales and profits.

SEO Speed Tips for Any Website

Google's ranking algorithm is complicated. It's easy to lose track of all of the things that you're supposed to do to keep your website's rank high – you have to generate quality backlinks, avoid duplicate content, optimize your pages for various keywords, and make sure that everything's easily crawlable. Many webmasters get so busy working on all of these things that they forget about one of the most important things to optimize your site for: speed.

Website Optimization 101: How Increase Your Website's Revenue

"Content is king." It's a saying you often hear in online marketing circles. Though it may sound like a cliché, the idea behind the quote is sound: high quality content translates to higher traffic, therefore, higher conversions. You need to make sure that your content provides some sort of value to your visitors so they'll hang out in your website longer.

But what use is good content when search engines can't find it? There is a ton of excellent, high-quality content on the internet today that remains undiscovered simply because it hasn't been optimized for search engines. Don't let that happen to you. Here are a few tips for website optimization to help make your website friendlier to both human readers and search engines.

The Latest Trends Evolving In The World Of Website Graphics

Web design has changed a great deal in the last decade. So when performing website optimization and choosing graphics for a website, it makes sense to tune in to current practices and trends. Take a look at graphics trends that are dead (are you using any of them?) and which are up-and-coming.

How Blogging Can Improve Website SEO and CRO

Adding a blog to your website offers many advantages, two of which we will explore in detail below.

Slow Website? Your Business Can’t Afford It

There are many reasons why a website can become slow. It can be the misuse of the content management system, the heavy data on certain pages or large graphic files that cannot be downloaded instantly. There are times when business owners finance their complex CMS and databases only to find that they are not up to the task. When a website loads your CMS, it will run all the site's assets through queries in the database. These queries are the ones responsible for retrieving the content of the page. This includes images, text, page titles and everything else on the page. The problem starts when the database cannot handle all the queries. This can depend on the CMS you are using as well as other websites on your server. 

Developing a Mobile-Friendly Website

The internet has truly reached its mobile-age. There are a huge number of people surfing the web through their smartphones, touch pads, mobile phones and other mobile devices. And that number is growing daily. It's incredible how so few businesses still haven't updated their websites with the times, and still don't offer their viewers a mobile-friendly site. Website optimization is increasingly important. The numbers show that around the globe businesses are falling behind in taking up effective mobile sites, despite the fact that the mobile internet is growing exponentially. It's even true for some of the largest Ecommerce sites, which still haven't improved their website's functionality for mobiles.

Localize External Resources

Summary: Even popular offsite widgets can slow down or hang your web pages. Learn how to localize offsite resources to improve web page performance.

Third-party widgets abound these days on the Web. Widgets, typically implemented with a snippet of JavaScript, are an easy way to add useful functionality to your website. The problem with all these widgets is they can cause indeterminate delays if any third party servers are slow.

What is a Widget?

Webmasters want easy ways to add useful functionality to their sites. One popular way to add functionality is to use a third-part tool, called a widget. A snippet of JavaScript is placed in the target web page, which calls an off-server JavaScript that does some useful task. There are widgets for many popular tasks, including Google Analytics which is used by more than 10 million websites. Other widgets include Jquery, survey widgets, advertising, Facebook likes, Google Plus, RSS headlines, and more.

The Problem with Widgets

The problem with relying on third party widgets is that they can slow down your site. When you load JavaScript or other resources from off-site you can cause indeterminate delays for your own site. Inconsistency in response times can cause a reduction in what Chris Roast calls "attunability" or the ability to attune to the response times of websites. Depending on how the widget is placed within your pages (HEAD, top of BODY, bottom of BODY element), a slow widget can at the least slow down the loading of your pages (bottom of BODY), and at worst hang your pages altogether so users don't see any content (top of BODY). Loading multiple widgets also introduces DNS and network overhead. An anonymous example is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Slow Time to First Byte Example
Anonymized Webpagetest.org Waterfall Graph Snippet

Even popular widgets can have negative effects on website performance. Google Analytics is widely used to track statistics about websites (formerly Urchin). On Thanksgiving weekend of 2012, a popular website for computers and laptops suffered because Google was slow that day (Sunday, November 24, 2012, see Figure 2). When configuring a popular Lenovo laptop (Thinkpad X230) Lenovo.com served up a page that hung for more than a minute, waiting for Google to deliver its payload to Lenovo.com.

Figure 2: Lenovo.com Waiting for Google.com

One solution is to localize the external JavaScript to avoid the uncertain off-site delay. Moving the script from the top of the body to the bottom, and caching it locally improved performance by 13% in our tests. This is with a full-speed Google on board. When Google is slow or unresponsive (as it is rarely, but it happens), your site can suffer. If the external resource changes frequently you can create a CRON script to copy the external resource periodically to keep it up to date.

Another Cyber Monday Example of Slow External Resources

Another example is PC Magazine. Searching for the top 100 websites, the page was delayed while waiting for an external server to deliver a programming API (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: PCMag.com Waiting for api.recaptcha.net

To be fair this behavior tends to happen on busy online shopping days like Cyber-monday, Black Friday, and the week before Christmas, but this third-party slowdown can happen at any time.

How to Combat Widgetitus

Many of these external resource delays are preventable. The solution is to periodically cache the resource locally on your server and serve it locally. You can use a CRON script to periodically copy the external resource over to your server. Here are some techniques you can use to minimize widget overhead.

• Cache the remote resource locally (CRON to copy periodically)
• Defer or delay loading to allow the rest of the page to render before loading JavaScript/external resources
• Load the resource in an iFrame to decouple the script from your page loads

Conclusion

External widgets can cause indeterminate delays of your webpages, which can reduce response time consistency. If your users cannot rely on consistent performance of your site, they are more likely to go elsewhere. To improve attunability, localize external resources to reduce reliance on third-party servers.

Designing for Delay in Interactive Information Retrieval

Chris Roast, Interacting with Computers 10 (1998): 87-104. Introduced the notion of attunability. Consistency in response rates is important for user satisfaction.

Diagnosing Slow Web Servers with Time to First Byte

Slow web servers can be caused by a number of factors. You can test for slow server response times with the time time to first byte metric.

Google Analytics Is Installed On More Than 10 Million Websites

Google's own conservative estimate of the number of sites using Google analytics is over 10 million sites as of April 2012. Marketing Land, Nov. 25, 2012 accessed.

Speed Optimizing Google Analytics

Learn how to speed up web pages that use Google Analytics with a few simple changes, while maintaining its advantages for faster-loading sites.