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Evolution of Website Optimization Part 1

by Brad Taylor

The fundamentals of optimizing your website are always changing. As Google gets bigger and more powerful, they add to and tweak their algorithms. Although many of the desired attributes from ten or fifteen years ago are still applicable to your optimization efforts, many new items have been added.

The theme for the early 2000’s was CONTENT. Your site needed fresh unique content to be a contender. That still holds true. But several other factors have dominated the middle part of the 2010’s.

Website Speed

Now that the content spike has been driven sharply into everyone’s brain, Google moved down the list of things they would like to see improved. One issue they had a problem with was slow website loading speeds. It not only slowed down their very own spiders and scans, it also slowed the lives of the people trying to use the site.

Old html websites served pretty quickly and you could get a site to load in a second or two. But today, a large number of sites are using a CMS (content management system) and serve individual pages from a database. An example of a very popular CMS is WORDPRESS. When you request a page from a website, you are not simply directed to the page that is sitting there on the server, like in some warehouse, that is the way old websites worked. A dynamic site will create the page from a template and a database and serve that page specifically for you. If the content is pulling from multiple databases and images from multiple urls then you can get a very slow website. And this is no bueno.

The rule of thumb in the industry today is 5 seconds or less. Your site should be able to fully serve the page to the visitor in 5 seconds or less. The faster the better. With WordPress sites the key is to not have too much junk on your site and make sure your databases are clean. You can even add a cache plug-in if you are worried about site speed. You can test your website speed here. If your customers are mainly from the USA then choose the option to test from the USA.

In our next article we wil discuss some of the other factors to consider when optimizing a site in the late 2010’s.