By Alex Peters • on 14/1/14

SEO for Mobile: Improving Speed Performance

The new year always brings with it a new set of challenges. As a digital agency at the forefront of digital marketing we’ve always got our ears to the ground.

Last year we saw the Hummingbird update which changed the way that the search engine giant handles conversational queries and the keyword (not provided) update which had a number of SEO people panicking (not us).

This year sees the continued move towards mobile as use of desktop declines and more and more people use tablets and smartphones to access information on the web.

Smartphone Speed

Google have been promoting the move towards mobile by highlighting the improved algorithm ratings for sites that have a loading time of less than a second on mobile. The industry has been going frantic discussing the news since Google launched their webmaster blog post on the topic.

They have said that:

Users’ flow is interrupted if pages take longer than one second to load. To deliver the best experience and keep the visitor engaged, our guidelines focus on rendering some content, known as the above-the-fold content, to users in one second (or less!).”

Overall, global load times have been decreasing but they are still seven seconds on average. Users on mobile can find the wait for information frustrating, clicking away from the page before it has even loaded. It makes sense for Google to be pushing website owners to speed up the process – after all, there’s no point in having great web content if your users get bored waiting for it to load and never actually see it.

Google has started to penalise pages and sites that take longer than one second to load content above the fold, after warnings from Matt Cutts in June and again in October. Digital agencies take stock.

Not only this, but there are other changes in the algorithm that website owners and designers need to know about. Smartphone rankings will be penalising sites that run Flash elements as iPhones cannot see these. This is where technical marketing knowledge begins to influence the bigger picture that is digital marketing.

The Challenges that Webmasters Face

Getting a website to load in one second on the 3G network is pretty much impossible for sites that are more complex than a single static HTML page. Negotiating a connection and getting data down the line takes 600ms, with the DNS lookup, TCP connection and HTTP request and response. The key element is the final 400ms in which the server responds and renders the site at the user’s end.

Poor performance can be caused by a number of issues.

1. Complex CSS declarations

CSS is obviously great, bringing us stunning web pages that draw the eye and the audience. However, all these complex style declarations force CPUs to work really hard, and mobile devices just don’t (currently) have the power to deal with these.

Developers may think that putting all the CSS in one file would make for a quick and compact site, but if this file bigger than 14k then there has to be multiple round trips to get all of the information, making the site slower to load.

2. JavaScript animations

jQuery is a popular choice for many developers who want to use animation in their designs. It saves time and developers don’t need to know JavaScript to use it. However, this can lead to issues as poor JavaScript leads to longer load times. Scripts need to be as optimised as possible, which you need to understand JavaScript to be able to do.

Instead of this, CSS 3D Transforms can provide better animations and is already pretty efficient when it comes to mobile browsing.

3. Progressive Enhancement

The way to build sites is by starting out with a basic site that can be read on any device, and then adding elements that can be read if the devices is more capable of handling it. This is opposed to building an elaborate site and losing elements if the device is incapable of rendering them quickly or efficiently.

Speed for SEO Success

Google’s tips for optimised web browsing are:

Server must render the response (< 200 ms)
Number of redirects should be minimized
Number of roundtrips to first render should be minimized
Avoid external blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content
Reserve time for browser layout and rendering (200 ms)
Optimize JavaScript execution and rendering time

You really should be thinking about your website and how it appears on mobile browsers already. This is currently being beta tested in the wilds of Google’s data centres, with sites being penalised before you even know it for poor performance. The technical practicalities that are beginning to influence digital marketing are a key component in finding online success. It can be the difference between the success or failure of a digital marketing campaign, particularly for businesses who rely on mobile heavy traffic.

To get ahead of the curve and to stay in the SEO game, get in touch with us here at Parallax for a chat about your technical SEO strategy.