Performance and Beauty
By now I’m sure that most of you have heard about the recent announcement by Google that speed is officially a factor in their rankings. This seems to have caused a little bit of panic amongst some people in the web community.
One web guru who you may have heard of, Jeffrey Zeldman, posted an article on Sunday wherein he describes the choice he feels designers are now faced with:
So now we face a dilemma. As we continue to seduce viewers via large, multiple background images, image replacement, web fonts or sIFR, and so on, we may find our beautiful sites losing page rank.
It’s a fair enough point to make - sometimes a designer will need to make a decision between additional aesthetic effects and improved performance (but not that often). What followed in the comments was disturbing though – many people were actually viewing Google’s move as a negative thing and seemed to be very worried about it’s effects. Some felt Google was simply abusing their power, others believed they’d have to sacrifice good design in order to receive a decent ranking. The situation, I think, needs a little diffusing.
Deep Breaths People
First, let’s remember that Google themselves have said that this addition to their algorithm affects less than 1% of their search queries. That means that while it is a factor, it is certainly not the most important one. It also means that while Google wants to display sites that perform well, their standards are probably not that high. If they were, there’d be a lot more sites being penalized in the rankings.
Secondly, this is a great move by Google and is fantastic news for users. Study after study has demonstrated that users really care about how well a site performs. It’s been shown that performance has an effect on bounce rate, purchase amounts, queries per user, credibility and more. If Google really cares about presenting their users with the best content, then this was a great demonstration of that belief.
You Can Have Your Cake and Eat It Too
Finally, there’s no need to panic – a site can be beautiful and still perform very well. For an example, let’s look at Happy Cog’s own visitphilly.com, both because it is a beautiful site, and because this conversation was started on Zeldman’s blog.
A quick look lets us identify some easy improvements. For one, there are 47 CSS background images. A quick run through SpriteMe trims that number down to 15.
There are also 7 scripts being called, 3 of which are unminified. At least a few of the seven could be concatenated to reduce some more requests and running the 3 unminified scripts through a compressor shaves a whopping 54% percent off their combined size. Finally, by running the images on the home page through Smush.It, we eliminate another 133KB of baggage.
When you add those fixes together, the performance of the site would be dramatically improved, and the visual experience would not be diminished at all. It would be indistinguishable from the unoptimized version in every way, except that it would load significantly quicker.
So in summary, performance and beauty are not mutually exclusive. By taking performance into consideration, Google is not making the web a difficult place for designers; they’re simply making the web a more usable and less frustrating place for users.
2 Smart Things Were Said
04/14/2010
Nice analysis of Visit Philly. I think it goes to show that most of us at design agencies are designers first and optimizers second. When building a new site for a client, we think of ways to make the site look great and accomplish the obvious goals of the site. We don’t think “oooh, this site will really be a good opportunity to combine and minify some javascript.” If a technique is awesome and will impress people, and we think we can pull it off, we’ll do it.
I’m not sure I have any strong opinions on Google’s move. My main blog’s home page weights in at 663k with a 1.76s load time. It’s not great, but I think it’s pretty much fine, especially since I serve a lot of it through a CDN. If that were to be in the totally-unacceptable/major-penalty range for Google, I wouldn’t be too happy about it.
04/14/2010
I agree – right now, for most people, optimization is certainly not the first consideration (and often, barely a consideration at all). I think that’s going to change though. The more data we find that demonstrates just how greatly a users perspective of a site is influenced by performance, the more and more apparent it becomes that basic optimization needs to be something we “just do”.
I also think that the proliferation of mobile devices will factor in. People want their content no matter where they are, no matter the connection, and they don’t want to wait. When they don’t have the luxury of Wi-Fi and unlimited data, performance will play a very big role in determining what sites they choose to get their content from.
While clearly I cannot speak for Google, I’d imagine your site wouldn’t be greatly penalized. For one, the quality of your content would almost certainly outweigh whatever emphasis they’ve placed on performance. Secondly, while there is certainly room for improvement performance wise (all those javascript files hurt, particularly those in the head) you do manage to rank a C in YSlow.
I’m not saying I think Google’s simply looking at YSlow scores, but I think they serve as a decent gauge, and I’d imagine that they’re only penalizing sites that do such a poor job of optimization that they would garner a D or F. (Again…just my hypothesis)