Optimize Page Speed For Happier Visitors And Better SEO

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When you think of SEO, you probably think of alt tags, compressed images, keywords, and W3C compliant HTML markup. That’s part of SEO, however, perfect HTML isn’t enough to place your website at the top of the search results. You also need speed.

In fact, speed is so important, if you don’t have it, search engine crawlers can’t crawl deeply enough into your website to index your pages in the first place.

Speed determines how much of your website gets indexed

Web crawlers are only allotted a certain amount of time to crawl the depth of your website. When your pages load slowly, a crawler can only go so far. Pages that don’t get crawled don’t get indexed. If a page doesn’t get indexed, it won’t show up in results.

Speed directly affects search ranking

In addition to affecting how your pages get indexed, speed has a direct effect on your search rankings, as Google announced on April 9, 2010. Google said their obsession with speed caused them to add “site speed” as a signal in their search ranking algorithms.

What is “site speed” according to Google, and how can it be improved? The answer isn’t as obvious as it seems.

Google is known for keeping their exact algorithm a secret, and they’ve never revealed how they measure speed, nor exactly how speed factors into the ranking. Naturally, marketers and webmasters got curious and decided to run some tests to figure it out. The results showed Google’s definition of “site speed” to be more complex than how the average person would define it.

To understand the results of these experiments, it’s important to differentiate the three most common phrases used to reference website speed:

  • “Site speed” As defined by Google, site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. They don’t, however, define what factors are considered in the response time.
  • “Page load time” Although used by Google, this term has not been specifically defined but it usually means one of two things:(1) Page load time can refer to the amount of time it takes for a page to be operable (enough of the page loads so that you can click, scroll, and enter data).(2) Page load time can also refer to the amount of time it takes for the entire webpage to render. This means all images have been downloaded and displayed, and so have all ads, analytic trackers, and other background elements.
  • “Time to first byte” This measures the time it takes your browser to receive the first byte of a response from a server. For instance, when you type a URL into your browser and hit enter, “time to first byte” measures how long it takes for the web server to receive the request, process and generate a response, and send back the first byte to your browser.

The most relevant metric is “time to first byte”

So, which metric does Google use to rank websites? Experiments performed by Moz show no correlation between ranking and what people consider “page load time.” Their experiments also showed that the time it took for images to load didn’t even factor into how a page ranked.

However, the experiments did show a correlation between ranking and “time to first byte” (TTFB) – a metric that has little to do with your content, and more to do with network and server-side factors like server configuration (.htaccess, httpd.config) and traffic. Some of these factors are within your control and you can optimize them to your advantage.

To speed up TTFB, and therefore increase your potential to rank higher in the search engines, you can do the following:

  • Optimize your web server configuration. Optimizing your web server’s software plays a vital role in increasing the overall speed of your website. When you’re running Apache or LiteSpeed, your .htaccess file is more important than you may know. You may be familiar with using this file for redirects and mod rewrites, but using this file unnecessarily will create performance issues.

Apache’s official documentation says:

“However, in general, use of .htaccess files should be avoided when possible. Any configuration that you would consider putting in a .htaccess file, can just as effectively be made in a <Directory> section in your main server configuration file.”

And:

“httpd will look in every directory for .htaccess files. Thus, permitting .htaccess files causes a performance hit, whether or not you actually even use them! Also, the .htaccess file is loaded every time a document is requested.”

These actions are guaranteed to slow down TTFB.

  • Update your PHP software version. Scripts will run more slowly on older versions of PHP. Keep this updated. A managed hosting solution will do this for you. PHP7 provides a huge performance boost over the previous 5.x versions.
  • Use load balancing to handle traffic spikes. Large increases in traffic around the holidays and during promotional periods can slow down your website. Load balancing distributes all incoming requests evenly across multiple servers to prevent any one resource from being overloaded. The result is faster page loads for your visitors as well as crawlers.

Cache dynamic content

Dynamic content is served differently than static content. Due to the way dynamic content needs to be retrieved, it takes more time to serve than static content.

For example, plain HTML pages are considered static content. When a request is made to retrieve static content, it’s delivered instantly.

Websites built in WordPress (and other CMS platforms) are dynamically generated. There are multiple things that need to happen between the receipt of a request and the response. The server actually needs to build the page before it can be sent back to the browser.

WordPress pages, for example, are built by getting PHP files and interacting with a database. This is why business owners who run websites with dynamic content management systems use plugins and server-side solutions that serve cached versions of their pages.

Hosted solutions from Skylands Networks include specialized caching for dynamic content management systems like WordPress and Magento.

Additionally, in their experiments, Moz discovered a counter-intuitive correlation between decreasing page size to decreasing page rank. You’d think that less content to load on a page would speed it up and therefore raise its rank. It’s not this simple. Google actually favors websites with more content and favors sites with fresh content even more.

Faster pages = Happier customers

Although Moz discovered slower loading images didn’t impact the way a site ranked in the search engines, they will cause visitors (especially on mobile devices) to bounce. It’s important to optimize your content for both search engines and visitors. Both visitors and search engines love fast loading pages.

8 UX Fixes To Reduce Abandoned Magento Shopping Carts

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You’ve created a beautiful eCommerce website with a brilliant product your visitors fall in love with. You’ve done everything right – your sales copy is well written and convincing, and it encourages visitors to add products to their cart. However, when you look at your stats, you’ve got a high rate of abandoned shopping carts. Why? What went wrong?

If this is your experience, you’re not alone. Thousands of eCommerce websites experience a sharp drop-off during the first step of the checkout process. According to KissMetrics, this drop-off is caused by disconnects in the user experience.

Here’s what you can do to improve your user experience and encourage customers to complete their purchase:

1. Minimize clickable options (like full navigation)

Consistent navigation throughout all your web pages provides a seamless user experience. However, as with sales pages, full navigation becomes a distraction during the checkout process.

Your visitors may not be looking for a way out, but when they notice clickable options, they may want to explore. When a visitor leaves the checkout process to wander around, they’re more likely to abandon your website entirely.

Unfortunately, even when a wandering visitor comes back later to complete their purchase, their exit still registers as an abandoned shopping cart.

The checkout process should support the visitor’s commitment to buy from start to finish. It should keep the visitor engaged in the checkout process.

The process should keep your visitors moving toward entering their payment information without any distractions along the way. Any options to make changes (like adding items or changing quantities) should be made possible within the shopping cart, so there’s no reason to provide full site navigation during the checkout process.

2. Ask for payment information in the right order

If you haven’t provided the customer with shipping options and a grand total, it’s not time to ask for their billing information. Customers want to know their total before entering their billing address and credit card number. You can write copy that informs visitors their card won’t be billed until they finalize their order on the next page, but they’re still going to be nervous about hitting that “next” button.

3. Use a progress indicator

How many steps are in your checkout process? Three? Ten? Even if your process is short, it’s a good idea to add a progress indicator to the top of the page. Visitors like to know where they are in the checkout process, so they know there’s an end in sight.

Your shopping cart theme probably comes with a progress indicator already, but if not, it’s easy to add one. To add a progress indicator, you need a set of graphics that represent each step, with a transparent background. Any graphic designer with basic skills can create these for you. For example, if your checkout process has three steps, you need a set of three images – one for each step.

One thing a progress indicator can’t do is make an exceptionally long checkout process seem shorter. If your checkout process has more than five steps, it’s probably too long.

To shorten the process, see if you can combine steps. For example, if a customer needs to submit their billing address in one step, then submit their credit card information in the next step, see if it’s possible to combine those into one. What the customer inputs won’t change, but the perception of one less step will make them happy.

4. Allow guest checkouts

The checkout process is an opportunity to gather email addresses from your visitors, but don’t force everyone to create an account to complete their purchase. Most people have more accounts than they can even remember. The need to sign up for one more user account can make a visitor bounce and buy from a competitor.

The Baymard Institute discovered 37% of people abandon a shopping cart when the site asks them to create an account. Forcing users to create an account is a barrier that prevents conversions.

If you’re worried about not capturing email addresses, there’s little to be concerned about. Most email marketing systems – especially high-end systems like Infusionsoft – can be integrated to grab email addresses from the checkout process.

5.  Design your shopping cart to match your website

Consistent design between your website and your Magento shopping cart goes a long way to support conversions. Consistency in design tells people they’re in the right place. Some people hire a professional design and development team, so the shopping cart looks exactly like their website.

Thankfully, it’s easy to customize a Magento shopping cart design, even if you can’t hire a professional development team. You can customize some elements yourself by logging into your shopping cart and clicking on “settings.” From there, you want to click the link titled “design setting.” Here, you can change the default colors and images and add a custom background or header graphic.

6.  Present upsells sparingly

An upsell is perceived as a step in the checkout process. If your checkout process is short, upsells will make it appear longer. One upsell screen might be appropriate; however, two will make visitors bounce. Screens asking visitors if they’re “sure” they don’t want the upsell they just rejected are even worse.

7.  Make sure dynamically displayed currency is correct

When you want to display prices dynamically according to the visitor’s geographical location, it’s important to know for certain the currency displayed is correct. Many countries use the US dollar as a standard form of currency, and yet some currency plugins display the country’s old, antiquated form of currency instead.

Visitors will notice this mistake, and if they can’t select their preferred currency, they’ll bounce.

For example, some currency plugins are programmed to display prices in the Cambodian Riel. If you’ve never been to Cambodia, this seems logical. However, the US dollar is Cambodia’s second official currency. ATM machines dispense both currencies, but most residents rely on the US dollar for everyday purchases. They’re not used to seeing small purchases displayed in Riel.

If your currency plugin allows you to assign currencies to particular regions, this is an easy fix.

Remember, the US dollar is the most widely used currency in the world, and people are used to seeing prices in USD. If you’re not certain currencies are correct, it’s better to leave your prices in USD.

8.  Speed up your page load time with LiteMage

Speed is everything. If your website loads slowly, visitors will bounce.

If your eCommerce website is doing well, but your Magento website is loading slowly, you probably need a load balancer. Magento is a wonderful CMS, though it can be demanding of server resources resulting in site performance issues that can cost you conversions.

At Skylands Networks, we use LiteMage to help Magento stores run up to 5x faster, reducing server load and increasing site performance. Contact us today to find out how we can create a custom solution for your eCommerce website.

Why Load Balancing Is Vital With eCommerce Platforms

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Launching an eCommerce website requires investing a significant amount of time setting up and managing IT infrastructure. To prevent unnecessary downtime, you need to consider things like disaster recovery, server security, and website security.

Traffic management also plays a vital role in keeping your website online. You need to generate traffic to make sales, but when you’re unprepared, too much traffic can cause your website to go offline.

Heavy traffic can impede your conversions

Each visitor that comes to your website is considered a single connection, but will generate multiple requests per page load. It takes resources to support connections; your website can only handle a finite number of connections at once.

Servers have a finite capacity for resources like memory, processing power, and bandwidth. If the demand for resources is greater than what your servers can handle, your website will either slow down or crash.

Your conversion rates are directly influenced by the amount of time it takes for your pages to load. According to a recent Google study, 53% of mobile users bounce when a page takes more than three seconds to load. You can’t afford to have slow loading pages killing off your profits.

Load balancing helps you handle heavy traffic

Heavy traffic can hit at any time, putting stress on your server’s resources and causing your website to go down. When your website goes down, you lose sales, and your brand perception may suffer.

Holidays, promotional periods, and new product launches can cause a surge in traffic. You need a strategy for managing server resources during these periods of heavy traffic.

The solution is load balancing, and it’s achieved with a special device called a “load balancer.” A load balancer distributes your visitors’ requests across a number of servers.

Load balancing is your best defense against a server crash due to heavy traffic. Load balancing is designed to optimize the use of server resources, minimize response time, and prevent overload on any single resource.

 Load balancing for reliability

 Your website or online service can only generate revenue when it’s actually online. Crashes or slowdowns due to hardware failure or sudden spikes in traffic come with a real cost, both to your income and your reputation.

Load balancing not only distributes traffic evenly across multiple servers, it eliminates any single point of failure. If any single server or load balancer happens to fail the system’s redundancy keeps the site online and running smoothly while the hosting team replaces the failed device.

 

How Load Balancing Works

 

There are various algorithms available which can determine how the load balancer distributes traffic. Your hosting provider can advise you on the best configuration for your specific setup.

Why choosing a dedicated hosting solution is ideal

 Shared hosting accounts are cheap – sometimes less than five bucks a month. You can install your own platform like WordPress or Magento in minutes. It sounds like a great deal. However, shared hosting isn’t a good option for eCommerce websites. Dedicated hosted solutions like the ones we offer are ideal because they give you full control over your dedicated resources.

Don’t be lured in by cheap shared hosting – it’s like moving in with unpredictable roommates who use all the hot water and hog the WiFi. Sharing resources puts you at the mercy of their demands all the time.

Your load balancing needs are unique – we can help

Basic load balancers can only do so much by monitoring for HTTP status code or text match. Skylands engineers are trained to create custom scripts to monitor your eCommerce website and balance visitors based on what defines up/down for your particular application.

We also offer LiteMage for Magento so all of your web servers can share a single cache. LiteMage improves warm-up time and reduces server load by eliminating the need to duplicate cache-loading efforts. In fact, our high performance caching serves cached content up to two times faster than other solutions.

If you’re a small business, the time will come when you’ll need to scale your applications beyond one server to improve speed and reliability. You don’t want to be caught off guard when your business takes off. Our flexible load balancing algorithms are activated on-demand and automatically scale to meet your seasonal and temporary traffic spikes.

We offer multiple hosting options for Magento websites, all of which offer load balancing. Contact us today to find out how we can help you with your eCommerce needs.

Is Your Backup Strategy a Disaster?

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There are all kinds of threats to your business’s data in this day and age. Computers on your network could get hit with viruses, hardware could fail, or a natural disaster could occur that destroys your equipment. It’s crucial that you back up your business’s data so that you can restore what you need should something go wrong.

While you should back up data regularly, that’s far from the only precaution you need to take if you want to keep that data safe. Read on for why you need a backup for your data and the best practices in creating those backups.

The Importance of Backing Up Data

When you have your data backed up, you can quickly restore it should anything happen that compromises or destroys it. Without a backup, you’re at risk of losing valuable data should anything happen. All it would take is one natural disaster or another issue to damage your business seriously.

Start by Prioritizing Your Data

The first thing you need to do is look at your business’s data and decide what is most important. You may not be able to back up everything, especially if your business has a significant amount of data. Figure out which types of data are most valuable and which you don’t need. For example, intellectual property data is essential and should be a priority, whereas schedules for previous months are of little value and probably don’t require backups.

Have On and Off-Site Backups

You can typically restore your data much more quickly when you’ve backed it up locally, but the problem with this is that any issues that affect you locally could jeopardize those backups. An off-site backup alleviates this problem by spreading your data across multiple locations.  With an off-site backup, you can always feel confident that you have your data available no matter what happens at your office. Make sure you update both backups regularly.

Set Up Automatic Backups

Manually backing up your data is not a good idea, because all it takes is one person to forget about it and you could lose valuable data. It’s easy enough to set up automatic backups, so make it easier on yourself and protect your business by doing so.

Use Encryption to Protect Your Data

You never want your business’s sensitive information to fall into the wrong hands, making it essential that you use on-disk encryption and data in-transit encryption to stay protected. Without encryption, a resourceful cyber criminal could easily gain access to information and harm your business. While encryption is always important, it’s even more critical when you’re storing certain types of information. Credit card information and health records are two types of information that have regulations which you need to follow.

Plan Disaster Recovery at Your Company

Something that often gets lost between backing up data is actually having a plan in place for disaster recovery. Don’t wait until a disaster occurs to figure out what you’re going to do. Evaluate potential threats to your business’s data and put plans in place regarding how you’ll respond to them. Your plans need to effectively minimize those threats and get everything back up and running as soon as possible.

Avoid Downtime

You don’t want your company’s productivity to grind to a halt when a disaster occurs. To ensure that employees can continue working, have a backup of your infrastructure that you can launch right away when it’s needed. This plan should include your more important programs and applications so that employees can still use them in the moments following a crisis.

Test Your Backups

Just like you shouldn’t wait until the last moment to figure out a recovery plan, the first time you use one of your backups shouldn’t be when disaster strikes and you need them to work. Perform a test by checking your backups in an isolated environment and see that they work properly. By doing routine tests of your backups, you can be confident that they’ll be ready to go when you need them.

Final Thoughts

While this process may be a bit more in-depth than simply backing up your data, a backup that doesn’t work makes a bad situation catastrophic. Setting everything up is well worth the peace of mind in knowing that you have your data and can reload it at a moment’s notice.

We Now Offer Rebootless Patching!

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Skylands Networks is proud to announce that we now offer KernelCare!

KernelCare is a service that optionally provides automatic kernel security updates to your running kernel alleviating the need to reboot the server. Rebootless, automatic installation of security patches takes nanoseconds, doesn’t alter the performance of your server, and quickly gets you to a better, more secure Linux. Deliver higher SLA and satisfaction for your customers by avoiding the application downtime caused by kernel security updates.

You can find out more information by visiting our Patch Management page, or by visiting the KernelCare website.