Page Speed and SEO

Grady Development's primary focus is on page speed and optimization. When it comes to creating websites, people often choose ease of use and comfort over performance. This concept can be beneficial, but often harms page speed and search engine optimization (SEO). The speed of a website is often one of the most important factors both search engines and users take into account (more on SEO). Website builders such as Wix, Square Space, etc. often do not prioritize speed and optimization, typically requiring users to pay even more on the already significant monthly fee.

How Grady Development is Different

All websites created by Grady Development are built from the ground-up. Although this approach takes more time, all websites built as such will be more performance since no additional tooling is bundled with the website. Websites built with WordPress, for example, will often include a plethora of useful plugins, but most of them will increase the page load time and increase the bandwidth your site consumes, increasing costs.

Having a fully customized website built from the ground up will include the minimal number of dependencies and will not rely upon foreign code or plugins.

Site Hosting Concepts

Most websites are deployed to the internet from a single server, this means each request nationwide, or even worldwide, will need to get the website content from this singular server. Depending on server location, page load time will be longer due to traffic needing to traverse quite the distance.

At Grady Development, we approach hosting differently. For most websites, it is possible to create highly optimized static content. For websites developed by Grady Development, we create these sorts of websites that are then deployed to the edge, globally. The "edge" is a relatively new concept where a website is not hosted on a server in one singular location, but cached in servers around the world, close to the user. Grady Development leverages cloud-based platforms to deploy to the edge, further increasing page speed and SEO.

Many techniques exist for creating and hosting websites some common techniques are as follows:

• CSR - Client-side routing
• SSG - Static site generation
• SSR - Server-side rendering
• ISG - Incremental site generation

Now SSR and ISG require the use of a centralized server, and CSR is not great for SEO, thus leaves SSG as a prime candidate for page speed and edge deployment. There are many ways to approach SSG and integrate into some content management solution, which is a whole topic for another day.

Image Optimization

A vast majority of network bandwidth is utilized for the transfer of images. Due to the large portion of network traffic being consumed by images, there are techniques to dynamically scale and serve the smallest possible image, reducing monthly hosting costs further.

All Grady Development website assets are converted to webp and scaled for several resolutions. The most appropriate image is selected to be served.

Final Thoughts

To have a hand-crafted website built from the bottom-up, served on the edge is vital for both user experience and search engine optimiziation. This article barley scratches the surface when it comes to these concepts. For more information and consulting about these concepts, feel free to reach out!