Hi guys,
this is something several of you asked me about.
Our goal is always to try to make our websites load as fast as possible. To “help us”, Google created a tool called “PageSpeed”, and in fact there are several other similar services, which give your site a score based on how optimized it is.
Unfortunately, these insights are often misleading. They do not measure the actual loading time. Instead, they want you to follow certain general rules, which, however, are never applicable to all websites and it is therefore nonsense to try to achieve a score of 100.
Some of the tips are absurd and I will show you a few examples, but before I do so, I want to emphasize one thing – I am of course trying to make the template more and more optimized with each version, next version will again be faster, but I just want to show you why you should not believe blindly what these services tell you.
Here are some examples:
- these tools will always suggest to you to cache files – which is USUALLY good thing, but I am sure you would probably not like very much if I set caching of your webcam image to what Google suggested to me – i.e. 2 hours
- similarly, it recommended to me to minify and optimize some Javascript files – this however is often impossible if you use scripts hosted on other webpages or provided by other servers. This in fact was really funny because the PageSpeed recommendation was to optimize the Google Analytics javascript file, which is – surprise – completely created and managed by – Google…. should I email Sundar Pichai about this?
Google PageSpeed is definitely a nice tool and it is useful as a quick check. But once you run it, you should simply go and see what is applicable and what not and not try to do everything that is suggested, just to reach a score of 100 🙂
But again – I am of course trying to make your page faster, for example, in the next version, most of the icons will be SVGs, which greatly increase the loading speed and there will be some more improved caching methods and script optimizations. I just want you to keep the above in mind and not think – oh, my site is not 100/100, I need to make these changes and this of course does not apply just to Meteotemplate, if you have other websites, do these tests, see if they can be helpful, but don´t blindly follow what these automatically generated tips suggest to you.
Hi Jachym, thanks for the explanation. Given that there are relatively few weather templates available I would expect MT to appear near the top of a search. However “xxx weather” for most cities will reveal a whole plethora of services, those at the top that can afford sponsorship or top class web designers that specialise in SEO. I did read that Google penalise websites that have the same tilte and description on all pages. Have you heard about this?
Best wishes,
Simon
Hi Simon,
“X weather” is so general and will in 99% cases give you official sources or commercial sites, we are still extremely small websites, even traffic in the range of thousands a day is nothing when you look at bigger websites. There is millions of websites about weather. Im sure if you look at some city/town that is much smaller, but my city for example is 500k inhabitants and there is so much stuff about weather…
Interesting post. I have also wondered how SEO friendly MT is before, and we have discussed this. I have tried to set my website title and description as per SEO guidelines which has lifted my site from page 7 to page 3 when searching for “Wimborne Weather”. This is great, but I would prefer it to be on page one or two, as it used to be with WordPress. Would it be worth adding the ability in the main settings to add meta name keywords? It is difficult to make a site like this 100% SEO friendly as you cannot set different titles, descriptions, and keywords for each page, but can anyone suggest any other ways to improve SEO rankings?
Hi Simon,
I have read a lot about SEO and meta tags are not really used anymore. That is not what sophisticated bots like Google look for these days. I posted a long post about this some time ago, I will try to find it. But basically – in the past, meta tags were telling the bot what your page is about. Now these bots are smart enough to simply read the code and determine what it is about, how good it is etc. Evidence? I never did any extensive SEO optimization, never had a single ad etc etc and meteotemplate comes as number one in many searches, such as free weather website template etc. It is about content these days, not titles and for example the “keywords” metatag is ignored by all Google, Yahoo, Bing and MSN bots.