Page Load Speed - SEO issues

[sorengen]

Hi All,

I have created a website for a client using Xara Designer Pro X. Their SEO Marketing team has run a GTmetrix report (attached) and wants answers to the questions below. I do not have a clue about this... if you can help I'd be very grateful!

I quote them...

"Page Load Speed Observations:

1. The initial page load is held up by render-blocking libraries of CSS and JavaScript. Is there a way for us to either combine these into a single call, defer them to not be render-blocking, or optimize them in any way? For reference - https://www.screencast.com/t/8g3HqEXq

2. Is there a way to leverage a more efficient*caching policy to cache these assets for return users?

3. Leveraging sprites for iconography. For reference - https://www.screencast.com/t/3eMWGZV11W"

Thanks in advance!

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Sorengen, if a company has an SEO marketing team they ought to have a website development team too!

1. The initial page load is held up by render-blocking libraries of CSS and JavaScript. Is there a way for us to either combine these into a single call, defer them to not be render-blocking, or optimize them in any way?

Not if your using Xara. These individual files are attached to every website Xara produces.

2. Is there a way to leverage a more efficient*caching policy to cache these assets for return users?

Yes. You need to do this via the .htaccess file. It's not to difficult to grasp.

3. Leveraging sprites for iconography.

Xara can't work with sprites (as far as I'm aware).

Some pointers:

If you're using small icons, fb twitter etc group them as one image, then overlay them with 99% transparent rectangles with links. Don't over worry about mouse-over animations too much, these only work on desktops & laptops, wasted on tablets & mobiles.
Reduce your home page. It has far to much content and scrolling. This also effects the load speed.
Think about using WebP images, they can drastically reduce the image sizes.
Give your images meaningful names, avoid '5026.png' for example.

I've created a cut down version of your home page. It scores a 'B' as is and I'm sure I could get it up to an 'A' without too much of an issue.

One final point, if your school is just a day school in Pflugerville Texas seo is not really a great problem. A few well chosen words in the page title and page description will bring your site up for anyone searching for 'Schools in Pflugerville' in the top 10 searches. If it's a boarding school taking pupils from across the US & the World it does become more meanngful then.

By the way your website designers logo is made up of individual bitmaps for each text character. ???

LINK

[sorengen]

Thanks so much, Egg, for your frank and very helpful response. I have passed it on to the client and we'll see what they decide to do. (As well, I will be working on fixing my designer logo! lol)

[Initiostar]

Thanks so much, Egg, for your frank and very helpful response. I have passed it on to the client and we'll see what they decide to do. (As well, I will be working on fixing my designer logo! lol)

You may find it useful to use Google's Lighthouse as a quick check - with a website open in a Chrome browser, right click, select "Inspect".



This also highlights any error and warning messages in the website and helps to identify their root cause(s). There are lots of other test tools, but Google is a good quick start /reference

[gcellison]

In fact, Xara will work for sprites. I use svg sprite files via placeholders in the site I'm working on now. (There's no reason to think it wouldn't also work for jpgs and pngs.) But it is not native to the software. I did a fair amount of investigation and developed the svgs in Inkscape (a free software) because the Xara software generates perhaps 10 to 20 times more data points than necessary and I find it much more difficult to manipulate. One point to make is that while sprites reduce the number of requests the server makes to load the page over individual files, it is probably more important to have a decent caching period. Good luck.

[Egg Bramhill]

In fact, Xara will work for sprites. I use svg sprite files via placeholders in the site I'm working on now.

That's interesting, could you give an example xar file on how you're implementing this please?

[gcellison]

I don't have a small project developed, and the svg sprite files are not on-line. But I can give you the coding I used in the placeholders.

The svg file has the name hotel-icons.svg which is located within a sister directory of main directory in which WDP exports the website. This particular one contains five images, each 48px x 48px, represented in this jpg:


In the WDP placeholder that I want the first image (the leaf) to appear, I use the code:

<img style="width:80px;height:80px;" src="../resources/svgs/hotel-icons.svg#svgView(viewBox(0, 0, 48, 48))" alt="Ecological hotel">

The image comes in as 80px x 80px. On the page, it looks like this:


As I said previously, it is not native to the software, but it works.

I hope it was enough information to help.

[Acorn]

@Egg, here's a Xara example: SVG - Sprites.xar

Acorn

[Egg Bramhill]

Sorry, my apologies to the two of you for the slow response. Yes, I understand that now. I like it a lot. I'll experiment with svg files now.

[MB365]

Support for WebP on export and publish is now available in Xara Designer Pro+ https://www.talkgraphics.com/showthr...e-21-0-0-61527

Download trial to give it a try here: https://www.xara.com/pro-plus-download/