Website Express aces Google's new site test

The web is changing. When a potential customer needs information or wants to find a nearby business or service, they will grab the closest device to hand, which could be a smartphone, tablet or computer. The latest research from Google suggests that "on average, people check their phones more than 150 times a day, and more searches occur on mobile phones than computers. But if a potential customer is on a phone, and a site isn’t easy to use, they’re five times more likely to leave." This means that it is more crucial today than ever to ensure that your website is mobile friendly and will display and function well on all shapes and sizes of device.  Furthermore, Google also found that "Nearly half of all visitors will leave a mobile site if the pages don’t load within 3 seconds". A website which is not mobile friendly or which takes too long to load will, therefore, cost you customers, and these factors are now being used by Google to calculate your position in their search results. Well optimised and fast sites will rise up the search results, and poorly performing sites will be demoted. At Website Express, we have tuned our high-performance Drupal hosting platform to deliver the very best mobile experience and speed for our customers. This has included using a variety of techniques including:

• Minifying all CSS, HTML and Javascript used to display a web page
• Compressing complete web pages by up to 90% before sending them to a browser
• Optimising all images to save transfer and loading times
• Prioritising visible content required for the initial page display
• Reducing server response times to under 200 ms

 The results speak for themselves, and Website Express is leading the way by achieving 100% for the mobile friendliness, mobile speed and desktop speed scores for its own website on Google's new "Test my site" tool: website_express_drupal_developers_google_speed_screenshot.png   Why not test your site and see how your business performs? google_page_insights.gif   For those of a technical mind, you can read more about the issues we have had to overcome to achieve these speeds and deliver a sub-one-second mobile experience for our clients here:https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/mobile  References:

1. Consumers in the Micro-Moment, Wave 3, Google/Ipsos, U.S., August 2015
2. Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, “Internet Trends D11 Conference.” May 2013
3. Google internal data, for 10 countries including the U.S. and Japan, April 2015
4. Google, Sterling Research and SmithGeiger, “What Users Want Most From Mobile Sites Today.” July 2012