Food bloggers, here is one thing YOU can control about SEO. Do this now, and see the difference…
I have already talked about Cucumbertown’s plans to implement CDN’s on our food blogs, and the biggest reason behind that, and I can’t stress it’s importance enough, is PAGE SPEED.
It is one of the few, if not only metric you can control when it comes to SEO. If you don’t know why you should be thinking about this, read this blog post from the Google Webmasters.
So to put it simply, your website needs to be faster if you want Google to give it any love.
At Cucumbertown, over the years, we understood that it matters a lot how fast your page loads. This is primarily because browsing has changed drastically. Google picked up on the fact that a lot of people are using cell phones and tablets to browse websites. So now, everything has to be optimised for mobile.But a lot of websites load very slowly on mobiles, especially because a bulk of the audience using your website is probably on a 3G or even a 2G connection that’s slow to begin with. This means every little bit of time matters.
Google takes this very very seriously. In fact, you can easily assume this to be one of the top ranking parameters after incoming links.
Whenever you design a page or a theme, you should take into account every second of load time. Your website should load under four seconds and if possible much less than that. Aberdeen Group found that a one second delay in load time can result in a 7% loss in conversions and 11% fewer page views and Shopzilla found that a 25% increase in page views resulted in a 7–12% increase in revenue and 50% decrease in expenditures on hardware. So in terms of ROI page speed has become paramount
Here’s how much Amazon lost in sales due to page load time issues.
What are the things that are making your website slower and what you should do to make it faster?
It’s simple really, how do you make your bag heavier? By adding a lot of things to it, right?
Exact same concept with a webpage. The more things you add to your website, the more time it is going to take the page to load.
Bloggers, at least bloggers who are starting off, are tempted to add a lot of things to their blogs. Widgets of all sorts make an appearance: Blogrolls, Social Widgets, Food Gawker Galleries etc.
The truth is only a very, very few of these will actually do you any good. Most of them are in fact contributing to slowing down your page. And imagine when you extend that to mobile. The scenario is pretty bad then.
Give this a thought: Why are you featuring your Food Gawker gallery? Why do you need to have the Facebook Like plugin? Vanity perhaps? Or you may think it is going to make the blog seem more real? But the sad truth is what you are actually doing is giving traffic away. If someone clicks on your Food Gawker gallery, they are going to go to FoodGawker.
Not only are you giving away free ad space and loosing traffic, you are also getting penalised for SEO: higher page load times.
In short, space that could have been used for monetisation related things like ads and affiliates are being given away freely and you are also affecting your pages ranking in the Google indexing.
With Cucumbertown food blogs, were debating on adding social buttons to a recipe page. Like Pinterest, Reddit, Yummly, YouTube etc. I was against the idea. Adding social buttons bring down the page load time dramatically. They are essentially code that talks to the respective websites that are most often across the oceans. This induces a noticeable delay. Now there are ways to engineer around this called, “delay loading” but remember every bit of code you write like this increases the memory bloat and this magnifies in mobile. Notice webpages that jitter on scrolling? That’s memory bloat. Google knows this and they use these signals to rank your page (Hint: Your Chrome browser leaks these data). We did introduce the buttons, but we did this after carefully analysing which social buttons would be the best fit for a food blog. And we did it with extremely careful plugin optimisation.
Plugin optimisation is really important.
Using one low-quality plugin that loads many assets (i.e. scripts and styles), performs complex operations, adds additional database queries, and performs remote requests to external API’s all at once can severely degrade your site performance. — Hubspot.com
Remember Search Engine traffic when it works is compelling. In our experience it only continues to grow month on month and one year down the lane you’ll realize you are getting 1000’s of views per day without doing any promotions or social activity.
Jane is an excellent example of this. Almost 90% of her traffic comes from search. It was only last week that we added social sharing buttons on her blog. And see how her recipes appear on search results:
So get rid of all the things that are slowing your page down. Minimalism is in. Look at Medium. Knowing that their webpages are going to be image intensive they have kept everything else beautifully minimalistic. This is going to be the future of blogging.
Stop overdoing the widgets. It may be the best decision that you take with respect to your food blog.
Stating the obvious here, but at Cucumbertown, we are obsessed about Page speed. As I have already told you, we are investing heavily to accelerate webpage speed by using world class Content Delivery Networks for blogs on Cucumbertown. Reliable CDNs are very expensive for food bloggers. This is also an example of how we work by economics-of-scale. We are able to club up hundreds of domains on our platform and pitch for volume pricing that we can absorb for a larger business plan.
Notes:
Here is a study done by Moz, the SEO experts on Page Speed
Here is a tool to test the speed of your website:
For any doubts, please feel free to write to me on cherian@cucumbertown.com
