Paroles.net was launched in 1996, and Paroles2chansons in 2004. These two sites rack up 10 million page views and 6 million visitors every month. 85% of traffic comes from SEO, which is why Martin Mutel, CEO of Cypok Media, reacted to Google’s announcements about Core Web Vitals and the Page Experienceupdate planned for 2021 by calling on Fasterize to carry out a speed audit. In this way, he is getting ahead of the game and speeding up the pages of his websites in a particularly competitive context.
Fasterize: What made you decide to carry out a speed audit?
Martin Mutel: Our Paroles.net and Paroles2chansons sites operate in a world of duplicate content. Lyrics are the same on all sites, and we sometimes compete with large international websites for song lyrics in foreign languages. As a result, it’s difficult for us to stand out from the crowd in terms of SEO content, so we have to focus on other criteria, such as speed.
Even though we’re aware that speed is just one signal among others for the search engine, we wanted to anticipate the update announced for 2021 by speeding up our pages to stay one step ahead in our ecosystem.
Google’s Core Web Vitalsannouncements , and the approach of the Page Experience update , which gives greater weight to speed in its algorithm, prompted us to take action.
To begin with, we looked at our Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insightsscores to see where we stood, and how we compared with our ecosystem. Then we called in the experts at Fasterize, because although we were aware of our need to speed up our web pages, we had neither the expertise nor the resources in-house.
Fasterize: Had you already identified the levers for improving page speed on your sites?
M. M.: Absolutely. As such, our pages are very light, since they’re song lyrics. It’s just text. But our whole model is based on Third Parties, and advertising in particular. Without these services, our sites might be the fastest in the world, and I wouldn’t need anyone to make them work! But we need Third Parties to ensure our revenues.
More precisely, Paroles2chansons pages could reach a size of 2 to 3 MB, including 1 to 2 MB of third parties.
The aim of this webperf audit was therefore to find the right compromise between performance and the reality of the business; in other words: be fast and earn a living.
Fasterize: What points for improvement did the audit enable you to identify, and what lessons did you learn from it?
M. M.: Unsurprisingly, it’s third-party services that weigh most heavily on our pages, but as we explained, we need them.
We are following the recommendations of the audit, while taking into account the fact that certain third parties cannot be excluded. In other words, we accept that certain pages may be slowed down by third parties that enable us to generate substantial earnings.
The Fasterize audit enabled us to focus on the essentials: displaying content first – what web users are looking for on our website – and advertising second.
To achieve this, we had to :
- limit critical dependence on certain advertising networks and use Google Tag Manager to include everything asynchronouslyon the frontend, and also limit the impact of certain service providers on the backend, in order to optimize both user experience and SEO ;
- put aside the freeCDNs we’ve been using until now, as they don’t guarantee 100% availability and don’t offer optimal connection times;
- sort out our video players and choose the most efficient;
- allow fontsto be displayed as soon as possible (simply with font-display:swap)
- inline the CSS – since it’s light enough, and the user path is generally unique, there’s no risk of side-effects on the client cache.
Fasterize: How did you organize your teams to implement the recommendations of the Fasterize audit?
M. M.: We have a very small technical team: a front-end developer and a server admin, who had some knowledge of webperf and who were able to improve their skills following the Fasterize audit. Which just goes to show that, with the right support, it’s perfectly possible to address performance issues, even with a limited workforce!
Depending on the nature of the task, one or other of the technical team members is responsible for implementing the recommendations of the speed audit. They are sometimes far from trivial, but we know that they are beneficial for the performance of our pages, and we hope to see the results of our efforts when Google updates its algorithm!
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