The time it takes to load a page has always had a big impact on how visitors navigate around your website, and more crucially, how long they stay on your website. 2010 will be a turning point for your website if it loads slowly.

Visitors won’t endure slow loading pages anymore

In 2006, Akamai commissioned Jupiter Research who interviewed over 1,000 internet users and produced a report entitled “Customer Reaction to a Poor Online Shopping Experience“. The main takeaway from the report was that the average time a visitor would be prepared to wait for a website to load was 4 seconds – any longer than that, would see potential customers abandoning the website and going elsewhere.

Akamai again commissioned a report which was published in September 2009 with the objectives of understanding how customer expectations to online shopping have evolved.  The results were astounding – the average time a user would be prepared to wait in 2009, has halved to only 2 seconds!

Source: Every Second Counts: How Website Performance Impacts Shopper Behaviour – www.getelastic.com

Wow – 2 Seconds! Does your Homepage load in 2 seconds?

The respondents in the Akamai Report stated that website load time is second only to high prices on a customer’s list of pet hates.

Have you spent all that time and money making your E-Commerce website look as exciting as possible, featuring products with competitive pricing on a website that has been conversion optimised, only to find out that your customers are leaving without buying because you haven’t put the time into making your page load any quicker…?

It has been proven that you can increase your conversion rates and decrease your bounce rate simply by moving all your javascript externally, building your website with CSS, Gzipping, removing whitespace and utilising low latency server architecture. Why not fix this today?

Page Speed as a factor for Organic Search Engine Rankings?

This is where page speed will get interesting in 2010!

Yahoo recently filed a patent that explores the ways a search engine considers the time it takes pages to render, for example how quickly that page is loaded directly after clicking on a natural listing from a search engine. Basically they’re hinting towards the fact that those sites that are the quickest to load will get a boost in the organic rankings.

Since that patent was launched, Matt Cutts (Google’s head of Web Spam) has been interviewed and he said that Page Speed will be a part of the Google algorithm (if it’s not already). We have known for a while that Page Speed has been a part of Quality Score in Adwords, and we should start to see it making a difference when Caffeine starts to go live on the rest of Google’s data centres in early 2010.

Here’s what Matt had to say:

Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.

I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘how do I have my site be fast,’ how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?’

Just this morning, Google blogged about released an experimental tool in Google Webmaster Tools called Site Performance. It takes the aggregated data from Google Toolbar regarding actual page load times, example pages, and more interestingly how your site compares to other sites. Although it’s still in labs, it is an interesting development and indicates where SEO is moving towards.

Finally, Microsoft’s Patrick Harris mentions Page Speed as the most important on-page factor to focus on for SEO in the recent webcast “Search Engines: War Stories from the World Tour” (Dec 1 webcast, 6:50 in the video).

As we can see, in more ways that one, the speed at which your website loads should be a major concern to you in the next decade…

How can you improve your Page Speed?

Other than the Google’s new Site Performance feature in Webmaster Tools, there are plenty of tools available to help you monitor and improve your page load speed:

www.WebPageTest.org

WebPageTest is an online tool to show you what parts of your site take the time to download. It provides a useful waterfall feature to give you a visual pinpoint as to exactly where the bottlenecks are.

Google Page Speed

Google have released their Page Speed Firefox plugin (also need to install Firebug, but both tools are extremely useful). This is similar to WebPageTest but you need Firefox and Firebug to be able to use it. It also provides a useful timeline of how your page renders.

Google Closure

An interesting add-on to Google Page Speed is called Google Closure. This plugin can compile all your Javascript into compact, high performance code. It basically checks and optimises your code which helps to make code that is cleaner and easier to maintain.

Usually First Rate’s blog is focused on internet marketing thought leadership, search marketing, performance advertising, industry research and trends affecting New Zealand Business.

Today we want to write about something entirely different.

First Rate has decided, as a company, to sponsor a child with ChildFund. We are proud to be working with ChildFund to help generate awareness of the global needs that exist for saving children’s lives.

Has your company considered a donation? Why not sponsor a child?

Give a child the chance to break free from the cycle of poverty, and the opportunity to grow into a leader, innovator, teacher or worker who will bring growth and change for the better. Your sponsorship provides food, water, schooling, health care and immunisation to protect against disease. Sponsoring a child is one of the most powerful giving experiences you will ever have.

Whilst one sponsorship does not save the world, it does make a massive personal difference for our sponsored child, Faith.

Here is a bit more information about her:

Do you have the guts to raise child sponsorship at the next weekly company meeting?

Think about it.

Have you ever typed in the address of a Google service and been surprised when that website didn’t exist?

Google uses a sub-domain for some of its products, (e.g. adwords.google.com, earth.google.com, mail.google.com) but uses a path name for others, (e.g. www.google.com/analytics, www.google.com/adsense).

This inconsistency causes confusion amongst Google users who may type in a URL containing the product name, but use the wrong format. The classic example of this is Adwords: Type in  www.google.com/adwords/ (with the trailing slash) and you may be astonished to discover:

So, this got us thinking here at First Rate, how many of Google’s products have both the path name and the sub-domain version set up, and how many of them have only one of them set up. And is there any rhyme or reason behind Google’s choice of a sub-domain or a pathname?

First Rate tested the pathname and sub-domain version for 50 of Google’s different services and products. The names tested were:

First Rate tested the following six URL formats:

• http://name.google.com/
• http://www.name.google.com/
• http://google.com/name/
• http://www.google.com/name/
• http://google.com/name
• http://www.google.com/name

The results confirmed First Rate’s suspicions: Many of Google’s products do not have the alternative URL set up:

• 64% of the products had both the sub-domain and path name versions set up (e.g. earth.google.com and www.google.com/earth or wave.google.com and www.google.com/wave).
• 14% had the path name set up but not the sub-domain (e.g. www.google.com/postini/ but not postini.google.com).
• 12% had the sub-domain set up but not the path name – some of the services had the path name set up for the version without a trailing slash, but not the version with the trailing slash.
• 10% had neither the path name nor the sub-domain version set up (e.g. android.google.com and www.google.com/android or insights.google.com and www.google.com/insights).
  Sometimes, this was because the product exists on its own domain, (e.g. www.android.com or www.orkut.com) and sometimes it was because the product in question has a longer URL than that tested, (e.g. insights is actually found at www.google.com/insights/search).

Further details

First of all, let’s ignore some of the tests – almost 100% of the tested URLs with no www. redirected to the www. version.

This is true both for URLs that exist at the redirected location (e.g. google.com/analytics redirects to www.google.com/analytics) and for the URLs that do not exist,(e.g. google.com/android redirects to www.google.com/android). Therefore, we haven’t considered the non www. versions of the URLs any further.

62% of the products did not have the www.subdomain.google.com version set up.

Perhaps we can let Google off the hook, as many websites with sub-domains setup fail to allow the www.subdomain version.

However, it is inconsistent and perhaps careless nonetheless, that half of the of the Google products that do have a subdomain have a www.subdomain version – and half don’t!

Finally, here are the full details for all the tests. (Note that the link checking software that we used failed to report on all the 302 redirects, it reported all of these as 200 ok – so the status code for the test may be incorrect.)

Product
admanager
adsense
adwords
affiliatenetwork
alerts
analytics
android
androidmarket
base
blogger
blogsearch
books
checkout
chrome
code
dirhp
docs
earth
feedburner
finance
friendconnect
grandcentral
groups
health
images
insights
labs
local
mail
maps
mobile
news
orkut
pack
picasa
postini
reader
scholar
sell
sites
sitesearch
sketchup
talk
translate
trends
video
voice
wave
websiteoptimizer
zeitgeist
Icons ref

Some other notable broken URLs include:

Blogsearch
www.google.com/blogsearch/ (with the trailing slash) – weirdly this one redirects to http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch/ which then doesn’t exist.

Feedburner
www.google.com/feedburner – you’d have thought that feedburner was a big enough product that there must be plenty of people who type in google.com/feedburner

Website Optimiser
websiteoptimizer.google.com is another important Google product with a path name but no sub-domain. First Rate loves this product, it is excellent for improving a client’s website conversion rate.

The Conclusion

Well, really the conclusion is obvious: Google as a “multi-armed hydra” has a variety of different business units and divisions, and perhaps this is the reason that there are no consistent website standards enforced?

And on top of that, Google don’t really need to care – because as a search company, Google knows that if someone fails to find a website they can always do a Google search to find it (and that’s why SEO is so important..!)

Sometimes, the search results for Google’s own products are less than good, e.g. they may lead to an older version of the page which has no obvious link to the newer version, or the phrase used may not match the product name and so the official page is pushed down the search results. Or sometimes even the link may be broken! – But that is a story for another blog post.

UPDATE: 10th September 2009

Matt Cutts has just pointed out to us that some of the inconsistencies are in fact intentional, on the basis of performance. Thanks Matt!

Outrageous Fortune won five of the key awards at the Qantas Television Awards, two Woman’s Day Readers’ Choice Awards, four TV Guide Best on the Box People’s Choice Awards and six of the top drama categories at the Air New Zealand Screen Awards in 2007.

Find out how our Watch And Win email marketing campaign promoted the new season of Outrageous Fortune to over 130,000 people.

Download the TV3 Case Study

Google has recently launched a new service called “Search Insights”. As with most Google services this product is free and very powerful. Search Insights allows you to research the popularity of search terms over time and by region. Different time periods or regions can also be compared side by side. It should be noted that the traffic numbers and regional demand are all normalised and so if you want to find specific search volume numbers in each region you should use Google’s Keyword Tool. 

As someone who has just listed their house for sale, I wanted to examine the long term trend in “real estate” related searches to see how this year’s down turn in the housing market is reflected in people searching for real estate. 

The two graphs below show the last four years of search demand for “real estate”. The second graph shows each year side by side and it does not take a rocket scientist to determine that I should have sold my house last year! 

Continue Reading »