About.com partners with Google to make the web faster
At
About.com we've
always valued coding and serving our Web pages efficiently. It's good business sense: reducing
operating costs while delivering on the promise of giving users the relevant, quality
knowledge they need to quickly and easily accomplish their needs.
Our
collaboration with Google's '
Make the Web
Faster' team this spring has focused on the following projects:
- Combining multiple CSS and JavaScript files to reduce external page
calls.
- Serving static content from a domain without
cookies.
- Leveraging browser and server-side caching wherever
possible.
- Compressing image file sizes on output, and serving .png
wherever possible.
- Asking rich media vendors and the Internet ad industry
at large to take performance considerations into account when building and serving rich media
ads. Any improvements made will ultimately benefit the advertiser, the server, the publisher
and the user.
Our efforts thus far have yielded positive results: we've
improved page load-time by an average of 19%
1,
and we expect to see further improvement through the fall as we incrementally roll changes
through all 700+ sites on our network. While it's hard to see a causal impact on network-wide
CPC2
RPM3
exclusive of market and other seasonal factors, results from two A/B tests have been
promising: one showed a 0.9% increase in
CPC
RPM4
and the other a 0.4% increase in
CPC RPM5
on the page and throughout the user session.
Overall, we're extremely
pleased with the results and excited to move forward. The experience has invigorated
About.com's commitment to providing quality content and good user experiences on light-weight
pages.
By Tara Long Lawner, Senior Product
Manager, About.com
[1] Percentage based on Google Webmaster Page Speed performance
03/15/10 vs. 06/03/10 on About.com's top ten sites.
[2]
CPC is Cost
Per Click, cost for the advertiser when the ad is clicked
[3]
RPM is
short for Revenue Per Mille (roman for thousand) pages. This is the revenue a website makes
per thousand views of pages
[4] About.com network-wide A/B test combining external CSS and
JS conducted 03/26/10.
[5] About.com network-wide A/B test serving images from a
cookie-less domain conducted 04/02/10.
