Smugmug problems

x4dow · December 1, 2016

Hi there, Google its hitting my website ranking pretty hard because of bad mobile pagespeed insights.
Anyone can advice on how to resolve this? if I dont find a solution, I'll have to end up redesigning the website on another host

leftquark · December 2, 2016

SmugMug optimizes your site for mobile and has implemented a number of features to ensure the best experience (and load times) for your mobile visitors. In this case, Google's Mobile Optimization test is quite misleading and it seems that a 60/100 is the best possible score they give (we ran it on a number of popular sites and never saw a score higher than 60).

- We leverage both browser cacheing as well as CDN caching, and pre-fetching to load images as fast as possible.
- We use Amazon's amazing worldwide set of servers to deliver your page as quickly as possible.
- We optimize images and only deliver images that will look great on the screen you're using (i.e. we don't deliver Original sized images to mobile devices)
- We optimize your site for mobile, when a mobile device is used.

I'll also point out that they're not using these scores to decrease the Search Results ranking for your site (at least not yet, and definitely not for a score of 60). This will certainly change in the future, as they start enforcing it more and we'll continue to stay on top of optimizing your site for mobile.

Lastly, all SmugMug sites pass Googles "Mobile Friendly Test", which is what they're mainly using to display search results. You'll see it passes here: http://www.google.ca/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Hikin' Mike · December 2, 2016

leftquark wrote: »

SmugMug optimizes your site for mobile and has implemented a number of features to ensure the best experience (and load times) for your mobile visitors. In this case, Google's Mobile Optimization test is quite misleading and it seems that a 60/100 is the best possible score they give (we ran it on a number of popular sites and never saw a score higher than 60).

FWIW, I ran all of the sites that I maintain (7) and all of them scored above 60. I saw 70-80. I do agree that I don't use Google's test as "Gospel". I generally use gtmetrix.com.

GetShotByShorty · December 19, 2016

What about "defer parsing of Java script"? gtmetrix rated me high 90's & 100 except this (I got a 12) can that be fixed?

iamagoo · October 18, 2017

I see this is a very old thread but I've recently started an SEO improvement course. Today's homework was to test my site for speed using GTmetrix. I too seem to have a major problem that it's telling me to 'defer parsing of JavaScript'. Is that possible when I'm using a Smugmug template?

x4dow · October 18, 2017

I went squarespace. My sites seo skyrocketed since

Hikin' Mike · October 18, 2017

@iamagoo said:
I see this is a very old thread but I've recently started an SEO improvement course. Today's homework was to test my site for speed using GTmetrix. I too seem to have a major problem that it's telling me to 'defer parsing of JavaScript'. Is that possible when I'm using a Smugmug template?

Not possible.

Read my SEO for the Photographer in my signature below.

@x4dow said:
I went squarespace. My sites seo skyrocketed since

What did you change. I find it hard to believe that just switching platforms without changing content will increase your visibility.

x4dow · October 18, 2017

Literally copy pasted everything across.
I believe one of the main factors was that squarespace had https with custom domains. Smugmug didn't.

Hikin' Mike · October 19, 2017

@x4dow said:
I believe one of the main factors was that squarespace had https with custom domains. Smugmug didn't.

That could be.

leftquark · October 19, 2017

Are you using a custom domain on squarespace? If so, the main difference is that almost all of your images and content on Square Space are being one of their URL's, which takes advantage of their high page rank to improve your own page rank. SmugMug customers have told us loud and clear that they'd prefer their custom domain to always be shown, everywhere, which hurts your page rank since your custom domain usually has an extremely low search ranking.

We are planning on adding SSL support for custom domains.

iamagoo · October 19, 2017

@Hikin' Mike said:

@iamagoo said:
I see this is a very old thread but I've recently started an SEO improvement course. Today's homework was to test my site for speed using GTmetrix. I too seem to have a major problem that it's telling me to 'defer parsing of JavaScript'. Is that possible when I'm using a Smugmug template?

Not possible.

Read my SEO for the Photographer in my signature below.

@x4dow said:
I went squarespace. My sites seo skyrocketed since

What did you change. I find it hard to believe that just switching platforms without changing content will increase your visibility.

Thanks Mike. I'll definitely read your post and try to put it to good use!

Smugmug problems

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