Improvement in Page Speed worth Compromise on HTML Validation?
-
Our developer has improved page speed, particularly for Mobile. However the price for this improvement has been a HTML validation error that cannot be removed without compromising on the page load speed. Is the improvement in speed worth the living with the validation error? The concern is paying a high SEO price for this "fatal error". Or perhaps this error is in fact not serious?
-
Fatal Error: Cannot recover after last error. Any further errors will be ignored.
From line 699, column 9; to line 699, column 319
>↩ ↩
`OUR DEVELOPER'S COMMENT:
| This was made following Google page speed insights recommendations. If we remove that, will loose on page load performance |
The domain URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com`
-
-
Yeah sequence of load is also important when its time to go granular to find the true opportunities. Because the up-front evaluation time that can identify issues, can often result in faster-easier-more template-driven ways to speed up everything on a larger scale with less effort needed.
That doesn't mean its okay to ignore other bottlenecks. Just that the more clarity of understanding, the more likely real, sustainable success can be achieved.
-
I agree with Alan's points. I have also found WebSiteTest.com really useful. It allows for multiple runs on multiple devices and you can download the results in CSV. Expanding on Alan's point around looking at bottleneck points, when you use these tools, you need to take time to understand the waterfall chart as that is where you can see how the browsers interact with all of these files (html, css, js, images etc).
I have been doing a ton of reading on front end optimization recently. Aside from all of the above, you could have issue with the critical rendering path (great resources here and here). Many times folks look at a single asset and say, "This javascript file is too big, lets minify it and get faster!" That is a good thing and will help you. That said, you have to look at the render path as you may have that same smaller JS file blocking other downloads that need to be downloaded first to render the page faster. Optimizing the render path can give you some additional gains.
Good luck!
-
Kingalan1
I'm not a programmer by trade - the way I begin even considering these things is by running tests on various tool platforms.
For example, put a page you think is slow into URIValet.com - test as Googlebot. The resulting report has a block of information in it regarding total size of files processed. It breaks that data down to file types. Look at the CSS/JS lines - if they are more than 50k to 100k total for either CSS or JSS, there is almost certainly inefficiency in there, and likely unnecessary bloat.
Go to WebPageTest.org and do the same - put in the URL you want to check - choose a server location and DSL (which gives a fair mid-range speed evaluation), and Chrome as the browser emulator. The resulting report gives you a lot of information, however the one page in that report that may be most helpful in this situation is the "Details" report - if you go there, and scroll down, you'll get to the section that lists, line by line, every single file, script, image and asset processed for that page, and all of the data on speed of processing each step of the way (such as First Byte Time, DNS lookup, SSL lookup, and more). Those can reveal several individual bottleneck points.
-
Thanks for your excellent, highly detailed response!!
Is there a way to test the CSS files that my developer has created to see if they are coded in an efficient and concise manner?
We use a virtual private server at Inmotion Hosting and Amazon CDN for for images. So I would think that the hosting service is adequate. Traffic does not exceed 3000 unique visitors a month so the load on the server is minimal.
-
1. Taking shortcuts that are not sound sustainable based methods to gain value somewhere else is almost certainly going to become a problem when you least expect it at some future date and this is a great example. Moving CSS and or JS to below the proper location is a recipe for complete page display failure on any number of devices that may or may not current exist.
Have you tested your pages with Google's Fetch and Render to ensure they properly load, or where they may get a "partial" result? If they get a "partial" result, that's a red flag warning that you ignore at your own peril.
2. You haven't provided numbers - is the page speed improvement a case of going from 20 seconds to down to 5 seconds? Or is it going from 8 seconds to 6 seconds? Or what? This matters when evaluating what to care about and expend resources on.
3. If just moving those to their proper place in the page header section is causing speeds to slow down dramatically, you have bigger problems. First one that comes to mind is "why do those scripts / CSS files cause so much speed slowdown? Its likely they're bloated and need to be reduced in size, or they're housed on a pathetic cloud server that is itself doing you more harm than good.
-
I'm not sure if it would affect the current page speed but it would fix the invalid HTML error from the validator. If the validation errors concern you it might be worth giving it a try and testing the result? It's good to make sure that pages validate all the high issues at least to be sure of no possible display or rendering issues in different browsers now or in the future.
-
Would correcting the code in this manner so the html validates result in a slower page load timE?
-
That error is coming up from the validator because the links to your stylesheets are outside the ending body and html tags. The stylesheet links normally go within the tags at the top but I understand from what you've said for page speed these have been moved to the bottom page however no tags / html / stylesheets / javascript etc should be outside the ending and tags.
If you move the CSS stylesheet references and the comments so they are where the javascript files are (before the ending tags) that would fix the fatal error you are seeing.
Hope that helps!
-
Thanks so much. I understand most errors are not too important. However I wonder if a "fatal" error should not be of grater concern.
Thanks, Alan
-
I am not a developer so any developer with a SEO background can tell you better but in general page load speed is important both from user point of view as well as search engine rankings and as far as W3C validation is concern, there are quite a few errors that you can ignore in order to stick with your page load speed.
Hope this helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Help with duplicate pages
Hi there, I have a client who's site I am currently reviewing prior to a SEO campaign. They still work with the development team who built the site (not my company). I have discovered 311 instances of duplicate content within the crawl report. The duplicate content appears to either be 1, 2, or 3 versions of the same pages but with differing URL's. Example: http://www.sitename.com http://sitename.com http://sitename.com/index.php And other pages follow a similar or same pattern. I suppose my question is mainly what could be causing this and how can I fix it? Or, is it something that will have to be fixed by the website developers? Thanks in advance Darren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODarren0 -
Many pages small unique content vs 1 page with big content
Dear all, I am redesigning some areas of our website, eurasmus.com and we do not have clear what is the best
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eurasmus.com
option to follow. In our site, we have a city area i.e: www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla which we are going
to redesign and a guide area where we explain about the city, etc...http://eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla/guide/
all with unique content. The thing is that at this point due to lack of resources, our guide is not really deep and we believe like this it does not
add extra value for users creating a page with 500 characters text for every area (transport...). It is not also really user friendly.
On the other hand, this pages, in long tail are getting some results though is not our keyword target (i.e. transport in sevilla)
our keyword target would be (erasmus sevilla). When redesigning the city, we have to choose between:
a)www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla -> with all the content one one page about 2500 characters unique.
b)www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla -> With better amount of content and a nice redesign but keeping
the guide pages. What would you choose? Let me know what you think. Thanks!0 -
Infographics and articles on the same page
Hi i'm currently designing an infographic and the infographic is based on a article my writer had created. I was thinking of ways in which i can add the article and infographic so they complement each other. Obviously the infographic is more in-depth then the article as it contains much more information. The infographic is designed to go viral. I was thinking of putting the info graphic on the top of the page and the written content below it. This way the person looking at the infographic can scroll down to find the more in-depth written discussion/article on the topic. Also from a SEO perspective, the search engines can index the written content (as it won't be able to index the the infographic since it's a image. What do you guys think is the best approach for this situation? Regards, Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mattcarter080 -
Moving from a static HTML CSS site with .html files to a Wordpress Site while keeping link structure
Mozzers, Hope this finds you well. I need some advice. We have a site built with a dreamweaver template, and it is lacking in responsiveness, ease of updates, and a lot of the coding is behind traditional web standards (which I know will start to hurt our rank - if not the user experience). For SEO purposes, we would like to move the existing static based site to Wordpress so we can update it easily and keep content fresh. Our current site, thriveboston.com, has a lot of page extensions ending in .html. For the transition, it is extremely important for us to keep the link structure. We rank well in the SERPs for Boston Counseling, etc... I found and tested a plugin (offline) that can add a .html extension to Wordpress pages, which allows us to keep our current structure, but has anyone had any luck with this live? Has anyone had any luck moving from a static site - to a Wordpress site - while keeping the current link structure - without hurting any rank? We hope to move soon because if the site continues to grow, it will become even harder to migrate the site over. Also, does anyone have any hesitations? It this a bad move? Should we just stay on the current DWT template (the HTML and CSS) and not migrate? Any suggestions and advice will be heeded. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _Thriveworks0 -
Why Would This Old Page Be Penalized?
Here's an old page on a trustworthy domain with no apparent negative SEO activity according to OSE and ahrefs: http://www.gptours.com/Monaco-Grand-Prix They went from page 1 to page 13 for "monaco grand prix" within about 4 weeks. Week 2 we pulled out all the duplicate content in the history section. When rank slipped further, we put it back. Yet it's still moving down, while other pages on the website are holding strong. Next steps will be to add some schema.org/Event microformats, but beyond that, do you have any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevewiideman0 -
Why does my home page show up in search results instead of my target page for a specific keyword?
I am using Wordpress and am targeting a specific keyword..and am using Yoast SEO if that question comes up.. and I am at 100% as far as what they recommend for on page optimization. The target html page is a "POST" and not a "Page" using Wordpress definitions. Also, I am using this Pinterest style theme here http://pinclone.net/demo/ - which makes the post a sort of "pop-up" - but I started with a different theme and the results below were always the case..so I don't know if that is a factor or not. (I promise .. this is not a clever spammy attempt to promote their theme - in fact parts of it don't even work for me yet so I would not recommend it just yet...) I DO show up on the first page for my keyword.. however.. instead of Google showing the page www.mywebsite.com/this-is-my-targeted-keyword-page.htm Google shows www.mywebsite.com in the results instead. The problem being - if the traffic goes only to my home page.. they will be less likely to stay if they dont find what they want immediately and have to search for it.. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chunkyvittles0 -
Why is a page with a noindex code being indexed?
I was looking through the pages indexed by Google (with site:www.mywebsite.com) and one of the results was a page with "noindex, follow" in the code that seems to be a page generated by blog searches. Any ideas why it seems to be indexed or how to de-index it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors
Hi, I'm new to SeoMoz and to this forum. I've started a new campaign on my site and got back loads of error. Most of them are Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors. I know I have some duplicate titles but I don't have any duplicate content. I'm not a web developer and not so expert but I have the impression that the crawler is following all my internal links (Infact I have also plenty of warnings saying "Too many on-page links". Do you think this is the cause of my errors? Should I implement the nofollow on all internal links? I'm working with Joomla. Thanks a lot for your help Marco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcodublin0