In the 1990s, one of the performance tricks to speed up a web site was to load all images on the front page but to shrink their size and hide them somewhere near the bottom. The home page would take quite some time to load but after that, once images were cached, the site seemed to perform at blistering speed. In the days of 14,400 modems when only the super nerdy geeks had access to a T1, speed of performance was important.
This seems terribly primitive today but that was in the day. Much of the content we use today was simply impossible in 1994. YouTube wasn’t so much invented in the 21st century – it became possible in the 21st century. Bandwidth used to be actually rationed in order to prevent it being swallowed up by what was seen as excessive multimedia usage.
So when I see that Google now officially scores web page speed (in the great Weblinx as well as many other places) it is no surprise – indeed it is a surprise to see it has taken so long. The search engines add value by filtering and prioritizing according to relevance. And user experience is rlevant to just about everybody. If there are two equally relevant pages for my search, I am pleased that Google now prioritizes the one that will load more quickly.
But is this news to the Web Designers? Should this be something we attend to urgently?
Answer: No!
Putting it simply, if you had to be told that user experience was important, you have some more fundamental things to learn. Whatever your website aims to achieve it will achieve it better if your users don’t have to wait for it. This is more fundamental than ranking – it is the most basic of very basic usability.
The SEO Lesson
There are somethings that will make an incremental change to your ranking and, as we all know, incremental changes to ranking can make a huge difference. But don’t be blinded to the obvious. Good content, good layout and good performance are absolutely critical.
Enhancing your site for speed to get a better ranking is like filling your gas tank and calling it fine tuning.
Duh!
