In conjunction with the ongoing user experience improvements of River CMS, Senior is also dedicated to increasing the speed that pages load both on the websites powered by River CMS and their admin panels.
Why?
Beyond the obvious reasons that website visitors will have an improved experience, there are other less evident reasons behind increasing page load speed.
- SEO: Google announced not so long ago that speed could be used to rank websites in its algorithm. This makes sense considering the reputation of a search engine is based upon bringing useful content to users. For most users, they would agree that faster sites are more useful, therefore having speed as an algorithm factor is sensible.
- Publishers using River CMS will be able to publish more pages in less time, allowing more time to embellish their content with calls to action etc.
- Less information is sent from the server allowing for more optimal hosting packages.
How?
Without getting too technical, we aim to achieve the bulk of the speed improvements via the following technologies:
- GZip: This allows files to be zipped, in a similar manner to attaching a zip folder to an email, so the user downloads a smaller file for their browser to unzip.
- Minifying: Although all files can be compressed via GZip, further action can be taken under the guise of minification. This removes the gaps between code in files, similar to removing all spaces in a document.
When?
We’ll keep you posted when we have completed the speed testing procedure and we hope you enjoy your new, faster River CMS.