Site Speed Continued.....

February 14th, 2014

Continuing in the same vane as last week, we will look at site speed issues again this week.

I just came across a blog that did a review on free (not really free) or cheap (not really cheap) website creation companies that offer a "build it yourself and save money" type of business model. They will push the fact that you don't have to have any knowledge of coding. You can build a website with the drag and drop method.....

Lots of things wrong with this.

1. You are restricted to what they offer when it pertains to customization. You can't customize your website any way you want because they only offer certain looks and layouts. This can be a huge problem or no problem at all depending on what you want to accomplish with your website.

2. Lots of extra code is included in every website you build because all of the tools you use to make your website are coded into the website behind the scenes. This creates a low quality website with lots of clutter in the code. This can affect your Google rankings, site speed and other loading factors.

3. What about keyword search. They will offer some SEO tools but how do you know how to write your on page content. Probably one of the most important factors in Google rankings is your on page content. Which keywords are most searched for in your industry and how do you include them in your content? How will Google perceive your keywords? What about keyword density? Have you ever heard about that? Which keywords do you want to rank for? These low cost, DIY website creation companies won't help you with any of this will they?

4. What about Gzip compression, image sprites, optimizing your images for site load speed, smushing your images, parsing your javascript, minifying your CSS, HTML and Javascript, leveraging your browser caching etc, etc, etc? What are these low cost website design companies doing for you in these areas? These are all important issues in site speed performance.

A great site to use to check your site speed is GTMetrix. They will measure your site performance using Google's Page Speed Insights and Yahoo's YSlow.

This is all important stuff when it comes to Google ranking your site and how relevant your site becomes to certain searches. Anybody can build a website but can anybody build a website that will have built in value? Just because you have a website doesn't mean you will be "found on the Internet". Building a website the right way takes knowledge. Knowledge of what Google wants. Knowledge of how to get your site shown on the first page of Google. Otherwise, really, what is your site worth if it can't be found because it was built cheaply without any of these considerations in mind?

Next week CDN's.......(what the heck are CDN's? Tune in next week and find out....)