Matthew Williams

Author Archives: Matthew Williams

How well do you know website performance?

How well do you know website performance?
How well do you know website performance?

How quickly did this blog post load? Did you happen to notice?

Most website visitors do notice that sort of thing, even if they don't realize it consciously. In fact, virtually all visitors have strong opinions about how quickly a website should load, how responsive it should be, and how often it should go down (preferably, never). Most users strongly prefer webpages that take under 5 seconds to load, and they're much more likely to leave without buying products or reading content if a page takes too long to render.

Everyone should understand how to keep websites fast

Part of the Cloudflare mission is to make the Internet better by helping it perform better. One way we are delivering on our mission is by sharing easy-to-read educational content to assist anyone with a web property.

We recently launched a performance-themed Learning Center: a series of educational articles on why performance matters, the factors affecting performance, and some of the best practices for making websites faster. Check out the Performance Learning Center!

This Learning Center is for anyone who wants to really do a deep dive into the complex topic of website performance, no matter what their technical background Continue reading

SEO Performance in 2018 Using Cloudflare

SEO Performance in 2018 Using Cloudflare

For some businesses SEO is a bad word, and for good reason. Google and other search engines keep their algorithms a well-guarded secret making SEO implementation not unlike playing a game where the referee won’t tell you all the rules. While SEO experts exist, the ambiguity around search creates an opening for grandiose claims and misinformation by unscrupulous profiteers claiming expertise.

If you’ve done SEO research, you may have come across an admixture of legitimate SEO practices, outdated optimizations, and misguided advice. You might have read that using the keyword meta tag in your HTML will help your SEO (it won’t), that there’s a specific number of instances a keyword should occur on a webpage (there isn’t), or that buying links will improve your rankings (it likely won’t and will get the site penalized). Let’s sift through the noise and highlight some dos and don’ts for performance-based SEO in 2018.

SEO is dead, long live SEO!

Nearly every year since its inception, SEO is declared dead. It is true that the scope of best practices for search engines has narrowed over the years as search engines have become smarter, and much of the benefit Continue reading