Esteban | ˈe-stə-vən - /collection/web-performance/

High Performance Websites

Nov. 14, 2020

Read time: 3 minutes and 30 seconds.

tags:

Google, the internet overlord

“Google it!”

“Check Google”

“Have you Google’d it?”

Common phrases we hear as we go through the process of learning, confirming, and disproving.

Google has a beautiful monopoly on search that has not been questioned in the two decades it’s been in the search engine game. For reference, sources state that Google could have more than 90% of the market share of search while others struggle to get enough traffic to keep the lights on like DuckDuckGo.

My preferred search engines?
Startpage (Like Google, but with respect for your privacy) or Ecosia (They’ll plant a tree for your search!)

More important than which search engine you want to use is the one you want to rank highly on. Since Google has a number of factors encompassed in their Search Engine Results Page (SERP), you want to be on the good side of SERP to make sure your content appears.

Find your problems

Google will always evaluate your page according to five different factors:

Although these may appear obscure, there are ways to evaluate these piece objectively by leveraging existing tools that will provide you with insights with the problems with your website. Here are a few of the pages I use to evaluate any websites’ performance in general:

These tools will always provide insight to ex

What you can do

These issues are not without resolve as there are a number of things you can do for your website to improve the performance. Here are a few “quick fixes” that might be applicable to your website:

Test, test, test

This is a given, but leveraging the assets in the previous section for testing such as Lighthouse and GT Metrix can do a lot of your heavy lifting when identifying existing issues. My workflow works as follows:

This is an iterative process that will vary by what setup you might have in website design and deployment. However, these are crucial steps in ensuring your website is not hurt by the internet overlords. #techtyranny