Google optimisations to boost your website's SEO - january 2023

Who's this update for?

Everyone!

What's the cost and how do I get it?

Absolutely nothing, it's free for everyone who has a Webdadi website. You don't need to do anything, the changes have already been added to your website

What's the update?

We've added some new optimisations to your website in response to Google's new core update. Most of these updates aren't visual, you won't necessarily notice them, but they will improve the performance of your website and boost your SEO. Google constantly changes the way it ranks a website, so we adapt your site to keep pace with those changes constantly in the background. Think of us as your website's personal trainer and nutritionist, making sure it stays healthy and fighting fit!

If you want a full breakdown of the technical additions to your website, you can see all the updates below:

Fonts

• Preconnects for google fonts - up to 100ms faster load time

Blogs

• Restructured blog items to output a trimmed and plain text preview for grid and slider items - Up to 500ms improvement in load time
• Restructured blog results tiles to output a trimmed and plain text preview

3rd party

• Preconnect to Google fonts & removal of redundant preconnects - 200ms improvement to load time
• Lazyloaded all off screen images including those in sliders above fold - average cms page with hero image and just text LCP* down to 1.850s from 2.249s and a reduction of 120ms to speed index

Icons

• Replaced all svg icons with sprite images. - Reduction on property results from 80 images called to 3
• Property details page has seen a speed index improvement of 300ms & LCP* score improved by up to 500ms. TTI** reduced by 600 - 1000ms

Code Optimisation

• Extraneous code paths have been removed from the onyx code execution increasing cold start performance

Images

• Background images are being replaced with picture tags to provide responsive images sizes and to utilise webp format - LCP* Down from 5.998seconds to 4.838s and improvement of speed index between 200 - 300ms

*LCP (largest contentful paint)
** TTI (Time to interactive)