Recently Google and WordPress have partnered with an aim to improve the web technologies which involves mobile apps and performance on their platform. For this Google is also hiring WordPress experts. Google plans to invest heavily to reshape the web architecture by taking help from developers, open source professionals and SEO experts to accept new technologies to help evolve an amazing web. Google has partnered with community of WordPress which is an open source CMS.
So many people around the world hire WordPress Experts to build their websites. WordPress has currently the largest marketshare in CMS segment which is equivalent to 1/3 of all the content published has been published via WordPress platform.
WordPress Emphasis on Speed and Mobile Apps
Since last 8 years or so the main emphasis of Google has been on Speed. Google is also going to release a speed update of its search engine in July 2018. It is already expected that mobile page speed will be a major criterion for ranking for the top spot on mobile search rankings. Google has already included the factor of mobile first index which mean the mobile version of the websites are being indexed and are given higher ranking in search engines results. As most of the searches (more than 60%) are being done on mobiles now hence the websites which will be slow in performance means it is giving bad user experience therefore it will get a lower ranking. Even the conversions at such slow sites can be affected with these new ranking algorithms. Google has launched the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project in 2015 with an aim to improve the page loading time and speed of websites on mobile phones. Therefore, Google is working together with open source communities and plugin developers to improve the technologies. Google is yet to get the desired results with only 0.1 percent of websites are using markup language.
People around the world prefer WordPress website development services due to many benefits it offers. WordPress has about 59% market share in CMS market and 29 % marketshare in the overall market of websites. Hence it is best for Google to partner with WordPress in attempt to enhance the speed of the web and make the user experience more enjoyable and reliable.
Recently Google took part in the WordCamp in US, one of the biggest WordPress developer events. After this event, Alberto Medina, who is the Developer Advocate in Google for Content Ecosystem, wrote in an article that their goal was to engage with the WordPress community and start a discussion around the performance of the WordPress ecosystem. At this event, Google shared the data in a presentation format which demonstrated a fundamental problem of the WordPress CMS i.e. Its poor performance on measures of speed and page load time when these were compared against non-WordPress based sites.
It is well known that WordPress developers have been struggling with bloated code and performance and security challenges. Although there have been significant improvements in these issues in recent past but WordPress webpages have not been able to match the speed, load time, performance and other indicators given by other software backed web pages. Google developer Median also wrote that they have set up a separate team to help to advance the WordPress platform and to improve its performance. It was also aimed to bring the platform’s ecosystem up to the current web experience standards quickly by using technologies such as Progressive Web Apps (PWA). As per the article, the vision and aim is to develop themes, work on WordPress core, plugins, themes, infrastructure and other tools and work with the broader WordPress community of publishers.
Conclusion
A Senior SEO analyst recently said that they have been waiting for someone to tackle PWA related features and plugins for WordPress for long. Most earlier attempts were not upto the mark. They expect there would be new additions like service workers and low bandwidth/offline content will become part of the CMS. Now it is expected that the long term plan for WordPress is to include the AMP like functionality into the WordPress core. Hence we can expect that this new partnership and collaboration between Google and WordPress will be beneficial for all.
