No web performance, no affiliate revenue

With a good conversion rate, the more traffic you drive, the more money you make. First, however, you need to attract visitors to your own site. If you've read our article on how to build a stable audience on your site, you know how to set up an editorial strategy and maintain your audience. It's also important to respect certain rules in order to move up in the search results, and to check your site's technical performance to ensure you're well positioned.

The need for a high-performance website

Google will have 91% of the search market on all devices by 2022. The company has defined the best practices for ranking well in search results. These include the need for a high-performance website, i.e. one whose pages load quickly.

On a search engine, results pages are called SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Everyone wants to be positioned first in Google's SERPs, but places are expensive, and in competition with sponsored results which occupy strategic positions. To determine which site to display at the top of the page, Google relies on a wide range of data:

• Behavioral data from visitors to the search engine: for example, if 90% of visitors click on a second link after having clicked on the first, this means that the first link was inappropriate. It will then be quickly replaced.
• Data collected on a daily basis by Google's crawlers: these crawlers scan sites, checking, for example, the date of content updates, or the presence of backlinks (when a site links to a page on your site, it means that it considers the content on that page to be relevant to its visitors. Backlinks are important for your site's SEO, as they tell search engines that your site has quality content and is relevant to users).
• Content quality: a diversified lexical field and a rich vocabulary are quality indicators for Google, and can help your site move up the search results. What's more, using a precise vocabulary enables you to target specific search queries and attract qualified traffic to your site.

These examples are just a sample of the criteria used by Google to determine the results that appear on its search engine. They do not reflect the complexity of its algorithm, but they do give a concrete idea of it.

⚠️ Bad practices: many sites have tried to fool the Google algorithm, but in the long run, it's not worth it. If you follow good practices and publish quality content, traffic will arrive naturally on your site, within a few months. It's tempting to use techniques to generate traffic quickly, but bear in mind that Google's algorithm is frequently updated to avoid cheating, penalizing sites caught at fault, in order to bring the best results to Internet users.

How can you measure and improve the performance of your website?

Although Google sets its own conditions, it also provides the tools needed to comply with them, free of charge. These tools are fairly easy to use, and Google offers tutorials for setting them up and learning how to use them. The 3 main tools you need to know about are :

• Google Analytics: This audience measurement tool provides statistics on your site's traffic: number of visitors, most visited pages, bounce rate, user path, time spent on your pages, as well as demographic data such as the country and departments your visitors come from, the type of device they use, and much more. It's the standard audience measurement tool on the market. You can create exportable reports, schedule them or even compare them with previous periods. The data provided is directly usable, and if you take the time to analyze it, you can learn a lot about your visitors and your site. While Google's tool is free, other tools are available such as At-Internet / XiTi or Matomo, which is open source.
• Google Search Console: previously known as Google Webmaster Tools, this tool focuses on SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO consists in optimizing your content and site performance to improve your natural referencing. In contrast, SEM (Search Engine Marketing) involves paying to appear in Google Ads. To help you, Search Console monitors your site and alerts you to any technical problems that Google encounters when crawling your site: 404 pages, incorrect structure, poorly formed sitemap, etc. These checkpoints help you to improve your site's technical performance.
• PageSpeed Insights: the speed at which your pages load is crucial. Google provides a tool to help you check the speed of your site. Once the diagnosis is complete, a list of actions to be taken is displayed to improve the loading speed of your pages. Here are a few examples:

1. Your site needs to be accessible on both smartphone and computer. In recent years, mobile traffic has overtaken traditional computer traffic.
2. Too many scripts can slow down page loading, so remove them or load them after your page content.
3. Correctly size your images and choose the right format so that they fit the size and weight of the viewing device.
4. Use caching to eliminate redundant element loading on your site.

💡 If you're not a web master, you should know that there are proven all-in-one content management systems (CMS) on the market. They'll enable you to get your site online quickly, while still being able to customize its appearance. The best-known of these is Wordpress, but Drupal and Dotclear are also available.