In January of this year, Google announced a huge update to their search algorithm. It is called the speed update. This update is scheduled to take effect in June of this year. To make is simple, faster sites = more search weight. Slower sites = poorer search results, all other things being equal. You do want your site to be found on Google right?
We’ve been working for the last 2, nearly 3 months, to move all sites over to the cloud, so that we no longer need to worry about bumping up against technology advances. Your site, is now hosted on the Google Cloud, that’s right, not any cloud, but Google’s own platform.
WOW.. sites that were loading in 4 ½ seconds now have load times between 800 ms, and 1.5 seconds. As of yesterday, all of our client sites have moved to the Google Cloud, and our dedicated server has had the plug pulled. Some of our older sites (2 – 3 years old) may not be able to take full advantage of the new speed increases due to the architecture of your site. If you have an older site, it’s still faster, but we really should talk about an update – technology keeps moving – so should your site.
Thank you everyone for your patience while we made that transition. Thank you especially to a few new clients that went live during the last of the transition, where we were in development on the old server, and going live on the new. The complexities in that move forced a good bit of re-work.
Many area quite content to have bulk hosting houses like Godaddy or Host Gator hosting their sites, and have no idea that their 5 second load time could be milliseconds, nor do they realize that their slow sites are impacting both the customer experience, and the search rank. With emphasis Google is putting on site speed though, it made no sense for us to continue to rely on our dedicated server.
If you are a preferred customer, defined as anyone that engages us to produce social content, and/or search optimization, there are quite a few new things we are now able to do, that we couldn’t before due to computing overhead. Now that we don’t need to be concerned with processing power, there’s a whole new suite of tools we can apply to ranking your site higher. Those will be a topic of future communications.
Thank you everyone for being clients of StudioHOF.
Jeff
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