Speed is the Future of Mobile Friendly

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Even though only half of business websites are mobile friendly, Google is already raising the bar on what mobile friendly means.

If you’ve surfed the web on your phone, you’ve no doubt run across mobile un-friendly websites that simply zoom out until the page fits on your screen. This of course makes the text so small as to be unreadable. A mobile friendly site on the other hand is designed to either present a separate page that was created for smaller screen sizes, or it is “responsive” and adjusts seamlessly for any display size. With over 50% of searches occurring on mobile phones, businesses that are stuck with zooming sites face stiff penalties, both in Google, and in user satisfaction.

Over half of users won’t recommend a website that isn’t mobile optimized.

 

Even among sites that are phone friendly, there is a growing speed divide. For example, the average load time for pages on smartphones has crept up to 4.5 seconds over the last few years, as websites get more complex and interactive. If that’s your website, here’s the bad news: for every second of load time, you lose visitors.Stop Watch

40% of users will abandon your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Google has noticed users’ taste for speed, and is quickly pushing fast sites higher up the rankings. Google has even spearheaded a new technology solution called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). The goal is to have super fast mobile pages that load in 1 second or less. AMP pages are specially coded and submitted to Google, which keeps a copy on their servers to enable the fastest load times possible.

Once more sites AMP up their page speeds, users will never look back. Are you stuck in the slow lane? Contact us today and see how we can help.

See full study (opens a new window)

 

Going Viral, Is Your Server Ready?

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Viral, just uttering the word makes online marketers start to salivate and also panic. You never know what will reach critical mass and go viral. Some pieces of content that have lain dormant, getting a few hits here and there, suddenly explode, generating thousands or even millions of hits almost overnight. Having a piece of content go viral can be great for business, but it can also be a disaster if you server isn’t able to handle the load.

SmokePicture this:

Your website is hosted by a discount company such as GoDaddy. This is fine when 1000 people a day are visiting. Then, without any warning, someone links to an especially cute cat photo on your site from Reddit. Suddenly 10,000 people are trying to access your site at once. The virtual server, which has a limited amount of processing resources available, struggles mightily under the onslaught of traffic. The site load times slow to a crawl, if people can get through at all. Not a great first impression for thousands of potential customers.

When the Google Bot comes crawling:Traffic Graph

Fathers day weekend one of our clients posted a blog. The image was picked up by Google Image search and the page ranked very high for a variety of web searches related to fathers day. As the traffic graph shows, there was a massive spike in traffic, with 2 months worth coming in over 2 days!

Over the course of about 10 hours, Google showed the image to 600,000 searchers, and the page to approximately 1.4 million.  That’s 2 million searchers, with the bulk of the traffic concentrated in the middle 6 hours.

Here’s what it looks like to your server:

Graph

The green bars on the graph represent the last MONTH’s worth of traffic. While the purple bars depict the 6 hour spike. The hit count exceeded 1 million, so I had to reduce it to fit it on the graph.

You can see that we had about 2x the number of average monthly visitors during the spike, and double the monthly pages viewed as well. The real fun was behind the scenes. Google hit (requested data from) our server over 1 million times, slurping up what would have been a year’s worth of bandwidth in a couple of hours!

So, how did our server handle it? No issues at all. We’re ready for your viral blog post.

CASE STUDY: FundAmerica – Results After 6 Months

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Our client, FundAmerica, was in need of a complete website redesign and rebuild. We rethought their content into a great new visual design that clearly and effectively expresses the complex financial technology services they provide.

We launched the new website on November 20, 2014. Six months later, things are going incredibly well.

Baseline

Analytics from the old site are not available, so we used the first 30 days of the new site’s life as the baseline.

Traffic Results

New Visitors

If you need a refresher on Google Analytics check out this blog.

  • Sessions were up 400%
  • Total New Users jumped an incredible 800%
  • New User %: 66% vs 33% (see graph on right)
  • Organic Traffic share – up 1220% (to 49% share)!

Analysis: Overall traffic more than quadrupled. New users dominated, which is exactly what you want to see with an SEO campaign. Direct traffic (typing in or clicking a bookmark) more than doubled and Search traffic increased dramatically, rising to almost half of all visitors.

Bottom Line: Google thinks the new site is worth putting high in search results, and users are validating that choice by clicking through. We call this a huge success, and can’t wait to see the progress at one year.