Correlation of PageSpeed Insights and YSLow scores to high rankings in SERPs

[kwoolf]

I'm pretty well rounded when it comes to SEO, but I'm just frazzled when it comes to YSlow and PageSpeed Insights. Of course, individual factors are important to site performance, but it has become increasingly difficult to recommend open-source and hosted platforms that don't pass muster on many of the performance standards being tested. For example, entity tags, expires headers, and cookie-free domains are nearly impossible to set with hosted platforms, and none of the major open-source CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Odoo, etc., consistently put javascript at the bottom or make "fewer" HTTP requests.

Mobile is now king, so quite a few people (including myself) need to "mobilize" their website by late April or risk dropping in mobile search rankings. Nearly all my clients run multi-lingual e-commerce websites, so that really limits options but makes it that much more important to keep current with Google's SEO recommendations.

What platforms perform best taking into account any correlation with YSlow scores/PageSpeed Insights to high floating sites on SERPs? Would one spend the money to "fix" their current platform that has worked very well to date or switch to a mobile-ready platform?

[gfiorelli1]

Hi Kevin,

unfortunately I suspect that the answer is going to be the classic "depends".

I think that - beside best practices - the only good thing to do is pondering:

1. your real business needs;
2. how realistic is the idea of eventually having a developer dedicated for few sprints to SiteSpeed solutions.

If your company's web site has a strong dependency on mobile traffic (in general, not just from Mobile Search) and you can rely on a full time dedicated developer, than I would first of all see how to optimize your existing platform for Mobile/PageSpeed.

Regarding commercial/free platforms:

• I don't know that much about Joomla (a platform that I don't particularly like), but it's community is quite big, so I would at first look there (click on Community & Support in the main menu);
• Magento is a solution that I love/hate in the same percentage. I do not know if the community there has created extension that expressly are dedicated to PageSpeed & Mobile issues;
• Drupal is something that really needs a dedicated developer for being optimized, but it is a solid CMS
• Odoo... honestly I do not know it.
• WordPress... I can suggest you this slideshare, which present amazing technical solutions (very technical, so a dev is needed) for optimizing it and make it über fast: http://www.slideshare.net/DistilledSEO/searchlove-london-jono-alderson-turbocharging-your-wordpress-website

[kwoolf]

Thanks for the input, Gianluca. I'm actually a dev myself and am about to abandon all these open-source platforms for a static site, but I do need a blog. It's a terrible case really, but there are absolutely no platforms built first on top of a multi-language framework. You either need a plugin, a module, a different store view, etc. Unbelievably short sided in my opinion, but that's where we're at. New open-source packages like Grav and PageKit don't support multiple languages, either. Just baffling! And SEO standards are flat out being ignored even most of the hosted platforms. WTF?

FYI, Odoo is an amazing piece of software, but their new CMS is far from ready. There is no URL redirect feature; no structured data; unfriendly URLs with post IDs and underscores; dev unfriendly--you'll really need to dive into the code to make changes, override, or customizations. On performance, Odoo runs on it's own openerp server through a Nginx/Apache proxy. All-in-all, the language support is ok and the design features are pretty cool, but these very capable developers almost completely ignored performance and SEO best practices. In my opinion, it will take years for this platform to compete with Magento or Wordpress as an viable SMB solution. There just isn't an easy migration path to Odoo, and it's too much work for no real advantage over the other packages.

Seems like developing a multi-lingual, multi-currency, e-commerce platform that follows current SEO recommendations would be a huge step for mankind. Still looking...