Keep It Stupid Simple, The Website UX Philosophy SEO Supports

Originally published at https://pushroi.com

All those cool widgets and embeds you like because they make your site “better”. You know the chatbox, Yelp reviews carousel, the fly-in Instagram imbed that looks like a 90s PowerPoint slide, that neat jQuery-driven social share widget &c, those are making your site slow, and that’s bad for both UX and SEO.

It doesn’t matter how visually beautiful and functional your site is on a large monitor with hardwired fiber internet. It matters that the site takes 30 seconds to become interactive on mobile with a fairly average 4g connection.

Reduce the number of fonts, and trim the functionality that only matters to you mercilessly. Remember, GeoCities was bad, so a polished version of the same pointless bloat is also bad. “But what about our branding?” you ask. Branding matters, but are those seven different Google font faces integral to your branding?

Don’t worry that people won’t follow you on Instagram without that embedded IG widget, won’t contact you if the chatbot doesn’t appear, or won’t trust you if you don’t load the reviews from a third-party site…