Hreflang hindering performance?

[theLotter]

I want to add hreflang on my website but the dev guys think it will hinder performance?

Any thoughts/experience with this one way or the other?

Thanks!

[simon_realbuzz]

Have your developers given you any further clarification on why they think hreflang might hinder performance? From my own personal experience of hreflang I have found that Google can take it's time before it shows the correct country URL in SERPs. However I did find that after a while that use of hreflang led to an increase in impressions and clicks.

Naturally rankings varied for keywords across different countries though it did appear that generally hreflang had a positive impact initially. We did experience issues with some of our keywords dropping from some of the country rankings but to be fair that was probably more related to a canonical element we implemented (but later removed on advice from Google) and Panda/Penguin issues we have been dealing with.

Perhaps if you could outline some of your developers' arguments and I may be able to address those.

[theLotter]

They are concerned adding an extra line of code will slow down the speed of the site...

[simon_realbuzz]

Sound like a typical developers cop out when they can't be bothered to implement something! I'm no developer but I'm pretty sure an extra line of code would have very negligible impact on speed. Think of all the other different types of markup that people implement on pages, from rel=author to rich snippets, to open graph, twitter cards etc. Nobody out there says 'I'm not adding them to my pages because they'll slow the speed of the site'. Hreflang should ensure that the right page is presented in the right country SERPs and helps avoid duplication problems and that has to be worth implementing.

[theLotter]

I'm totally with you.... any ideas of a better response I can give them (proof from a source) that the impact on speed will be negligible?

[simon_realbuzz]

I'm afraid I can't offer any proof as such. I know there is an alternative way of implementing hreflang through xml sitemaps so you can avoid having to add the extra lines in the code within your pages. It's not something I've ever implemented but you can find more about it in the Using hreflang in sitemaps section of this article. Might be worth looking into.

[theLotter]

Thanks - that could be a decent alternative to offer!