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How CDNs can give you critical advantage in mobile SEO

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Anand Srinivasan
September 25, 2015


Anand Srinivasan
Anand Srinivasan has written 7 articles for DomainInformer.
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In the fast-paced world of digital content, mobile devices have come to play an increasingly critical role, especially with the rise of smartphones and tablets as primary means of accessing the Internet. Mobile traffic has already overtaken the web traffic back in 2014. This means that the greater portion of Internet traffic today comes from mobile devices. Consequently, this has forced websites to address the mobile trends and to optimize their websites accordingly.

To further cement this mobile revolution, Google announced this year that it has started receiving more searches from mobile device than desktop users in ten key countries, including the U.S. and Japan. In view of this, the company has started to implement significant changes in its ranking algorithm for mobile searches. Mobile-friendliness is now a major deciding index for the ranking of web pages on mobile searches.

For a website, this means that the better it performs on mobile devices, the higher it will be ranked in Google listings as displayed to mobile users. So we’ve come to the crucial point where the layout, design and performance of a website on smartphones and tablets are now key aspects in search optimization.

Design and speed considerations

These huge changes call for an imminent need of mobile optimization for websites. Mobile optimization is based on a number of factors. In terms of design and layout, the key is how well the design adapts to a mobile device’s screen.

Site design is perhaps the more well-known aspect of designing for mobile screens. The two basic concepts are either responsive or adaptive design. Responsive design involves a fluid layout that easily changes to any screen size without tarnishing the user experience. Meanwhile, adaptive web design takes into consideration a set number of devices, screen sizes and other related factors, and then adjusts the HTML it delivers accordingly. The key aim of both design ideals is to ensure that content appears and performs exactly as if it was created for a particular user and his mobile device.

Going beyond layout, however, one big concern for mobile users website loading speed. Users expect lightning-speed connections and are generally less willing to wait for a webpage to load if they are on a wireless broadband connection. The longer a website takes to load, the greater is the chance that the user will simply close the window or browse elsewhere. Thus, site loading speed is directly linked to the number of users it can successfully attract, retain, and possibly convert.

Every millisecond counts

To attract more traffic, every millisecond shaved off from a website’s loading time counts. Every millisecond reduced is an immense opportunity to attract more users, reach more mobile devices and get ranked higher in Google search results. Conversely, every second of delay takes away a huge chunk of potential users.

Studies carried out by Radware show that up to 51% of online shoppers in the U.S. say they would browse away if a website loaded too slowly for a quick purchase. Another research finds that 47% of web users expect a site to load within two seconds, and that 75% of the users will gladly go to a different website if their first choice is too slow. In other words, the page load speed metric can definitively determine the success or failure of a website in the long-run.

Optimizing infrastructure and design

Since we are talking about mobile traffic, the most accessible factor would be web design. Your website’s elements should be optimized for the mobile user. For instance, image file sizes meant for smaller screens and smaller devices would need to be small enough to accommodate slow connections or low device processing power.

A more fundamental technique is to optimize your website’s back-end infrastructure. One way to achieve this is by implementing server-side optimizations like hosting your static content (images, stylesheets or other media) on a content delivery network (CDN). These services host content on servers distributed around the globe. This way, users will be able to access the content from the server geographically closest to their location, thus reducing latency and improving overall page loading speeds.

A CDN improves page loading speed by reducing the Time To First Byte (TTFB) or the duration between a user’s HTTP request and the first byte received by the browser as a result. In terms of search optimization, it is a web page’s TTFB that directly influences the search engine ranking of that page. Improving TTFB is thus critical.

A capable CDN can improve your website’s load speed by as much as 50% and reduce bandwidth by 40% or more. Caching content at different data centers allows the website to render very quickly on the user’s end. As an added benefit, CDN providers like Incapsula utilize intelligent traffic analysis -- caching and rendering preferences are based on actual traffic trends.

Other considerations

Designers and developers will also need to consider the directions recommended by Google in using Javascript and other scripts. The use of synchronous scripts -- which have to be fetched and downloaded before the rest of the page loads -- can significantly delay rendering, resulting in user churn and reduced search optimization.

To avoid this, make sure that JavaScript does not block page rendering. This can be achieved by using asynchronous scripts that download in the background while the page loads. And to make sure the page loads meanwhile, you can place them inline, which work best for smaller scripts.

Somewhat similar recommendations apply to the use of cascading stylesheets (CSS). If page rendering is blocked until an external stylesheet is downloaded, it slows down the website. Again, you can tackle this by in-lining a stylesheet, which will let the page to render while the stylesheet is downloaded and processed in the background. This may not work well with larger stylesheets.

Going back to CDN services, these can ideally cache Javascript resources and stylesheets, so that these are served directly from nearby servers. This enables the use of larger scripts without losing on loading speed. As an added service, the aforementioned Incapsula also offers minification of JavaScript and CSS, which intelligently reduces their size without affecting functionality. You can further make use of on-the-fly compression which gzips JS and CSS files right before they are transferred to the user device.

Conclusion

With Google focused on mobile traffic, the search giant has been modifying its search ranking policies and algorithms accordingly. Starting from April this year, Google has started using mobile-friendliness as a major index in ranking mobile searches. Thus, for websites that aim to attract mobile users, optimizing the infrastructure and design will be important in survival.

The best approach in optimizing for mobile devices is to find holistic perspective in the content, design and infrastructure. Mobile users have shorter attention spans. They want speedier content delivery, all within the challenge of having a user experience can be far more varied than that of desktop users.

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