Don’t accept a janky website – with Jono Alderson

Make your websites better and don't accept that them being broken and Janke is okay. [Music] I'm John O'Allison and this is SEO in 2026. Here we are. Every year I love your pronunciation of the word this, but I think 2026 even beat that 2026. It's very exciting. John O'Allison number one, SEO tip for 2026. Guys, I've forgotten already. My number one tip this year is to stop accepting technical mediocrity. What does mediocrity look like in the word of technical SEO? We all know it and see it all the time. We have accepted that it's normal for websites to be rubbish. Whether they're the ones we work on or our clients or the ones we browse, things are slow. We hit four hours. There's a bunch of JavaScript learning which means when you trick the thing, it doesn't respond quickly. It doesn't quite show on screen properly that fonts too small. The thing that are ugly, it takes four minutes for something to add to the cart and then the cart was empty all along. But somehow we're all kind of okay with this because it's so normal for all of these interactions to be so rad that we just kind of get on with it. And the large part Google, putting the SEO hat back on for minutes, the last part, Google has kind of coped with that and they've kind of made the most of the web being janky and broken and poorly built. But as we enter this kind of as we enter this age of AI which I'm sure everybody is talking about the rules do change slightly because these systems aren't as good for unpicking that mess. And they aren't as incentivized to as Google has been this when you look at their commercial and political and product road maps and you look at the way they interact websites and stuff. It's a very different machine and they are much less tolerant of faults and errors and emissions and gaps and they won't put the same resources and the Google has to wait through that. Janky of extremely poor or unreliable quality informal North American apparently. Oh wow, I've gone gone over the pond. I deserve Janky is a word. It's so visceral. It's such a great. Like we all we all feel this and see this all the time when we just kind of accept it. So it's nice to take a step back and actually this isn't good enough. It's not not how it should be. You say that most SEO strategies ignore the platform itself for the key aspects of the platform that need to be looked at. Yeah, so we call ourselves digital marketers or subset of digital marketing and we kind of forget that that first word means something that canvas isn't billboards on newspapers or shopfronts. It is the web and that in order to do the web well, you need to consider it's the mutations, the mechanics, the ways it works and take advantage of those and to mitigate the disadvantages. And I think good as you overquires that you really consider how is this web page transmitted to the user. What is it comprised of? Is it well built and managed? Is it brittle? Are the things in the white order? Does it use the white ingredients? Is it using legacy code that might be slow or cumbersome or not work right well? Does it crash on older mobile phones visiting from countries that maybe don't have good network connectivity? And a hundred of these are the considerations that I think we all have a tendency to overlook because it's perceived as kind of developer reengineered guppins. But I think it's almost as critical as is our content relevant and do we have lots of links in a great reputation? You see that many developers consistently choose stacks that bloat and break him. Are you able to name any? Oh, absolutely. So I think this started in around 2011 with the birth of angular, which was the first kind of real modern JavaScript stack. And suddenly overnight we went to my web, which was very very web centric people with servers and frameworks and infrastructure to a culture of app developers and software developers entering the scene who then conflated to the word website and app. And they started to be used interchangeably when they're actually very different things. And from there we got the birth of react we got view we got the sell we got a hundred variations that is. Now today if you were launching a fancy startup your platform of choice would probably be something based on react hosted on some kind of client side infrastructure, etc. The problem with world of that is that the world of SEO and Google and increasing the eight and to no LMS aren't designed to consume and digest apps they're designed to browse the open web. Websites and applications are different things that should work in different ways, but we've normalized a culture where we use tool kits to build websites, which is why we end up with slow, client side rendered JavaScript powered sites which ship 20 megabytes of JavaScript before they put an image on the page and load different and it requires a team of 28 people to take four weeks to change ahead attack on a page and it's all very dev centric. And part of the reason this persists is because the developers and engineers who build using these tools prefer that tools and they prefer their preferences over the preferences of the end users and the marketers and the businesses and we've normalized this and this is why the web enlarges mediocre because we are using the wrong tools for the wrong job. How can a single SEO and a business battle against mediocre developers shipping fragile code unnecessary complexity as you put it. It's one of the nice things that's happened. I think it's taking a step back. One of the reasons this all started was because browsers were terrible to work with. Chrome was very different to Firefox was very different in genetics for et cetera and the JavaScript ecology allows you to pay for a lot of that. Now that's not the case browsers are great chrome and the chromium stuff and all the consortium work they're doing together with the other browsers makes support for features consistent. It makes standards universal. So now browsers can do a lot of what JavaScript has been used to do like transition between pages like pre load stuff before it's needed. So actually we're in a position where most websites could go back to basics and they could just be clean semantic simple HTML. They could just use CSS animation since it's a JavaScript they could just send pages instead of fragments of applications. So I think as an individual person you can take a step back and say why do we need all of this complexity when something simple would do the same job in the same way with far less overhead. And if you want to play the long game of what point should we start saying we should rip down all of this architecture that we've spent a decade building in the wrong direction and doing something that's inherently natively much weaker. So if you're in an organization where you're already fighting against all of this stuff. I think being that voice that says at what point do we start to change direction it quite important and you can start with small bits like replace bits of JavaScript with bits of CSS. The pace soups of divs within ditch within spans in HTML cup with more semantic stuff and like actually use an H wall on a page actually using a side to say this is a sidebar machines are reading the school's reading it. LLams are reading it that maybe using it who knows but it does make the web an easier ecosystem to exist in and plus so I think it's worth the effort. Is it really an SEO job to actually have these conversations with developers because it seems like tough conversations to have and it seems like they're waiting through tree call trying to understand code from perhaps these should actually be focusing on how to rank and Google as opposed to actually how to build a website properly. Yeah, I think you need to do both so we're saying I think understanding and advocating for what a good website looks like technically is as important as saying is our content good do we have the right links are we. Aligning with the right product market fit et cetera I think if you ignore the website bits what you're doing in digital marketing or as you just marketing right you're putting nice words and pictures on a pamphlet but if that pamphlet is inaccessible to Google or takes six seconds to load. You are not going to be well equipped for the future I think in particular for zoom out and look at what is the web look like in about two three five years now we assume that there'll be a raise of a rising energetic searching where. I search for something and there's a query fan app process and 100 searches happen and those searches trigger other things that trigger other things if every one of those interactions or if you just one of those interactions takes four seconds and returns a bunch of mouth form Jason or. It's a server error because somebody didn't configure a flower correctly then the whole thing comes tumbling down and where your site might have been recommended or your content might have been extracted and cited you're suddenly not visible at full so I think the technical integrity of your site as a process of future proofing I think is more critical than it is ever been Google is let us be lazy Google's ability and Chrome's ability to ignore errors and performance has let us ignore this and get away with it being bad to a decade now. And that's no longer the case. If you see a web page loading in six seconds and you're pretty sure that you can improve the speed to two seconds how do you actually articulate that to stakeholders within a business to actually talk about the financial value potentially of improving version rates improved user retention and. You're ultimately improve purchases as a result of that improve page speed yeah absolutely I think we've had 15 years of really good research on this w p o stats.com is a really great research that has. filter a ball he studies on every combination of we shape 1.4 seconds of LCPE. we reduced our server response time by 20%, variations on those narratives, all of which you can wave under your C-suite scenarios and say, "Look, milliseconds do convert to money." And then some other arms you can pull as well, you can play the E-cur card, because if your site is taking four seconds to load, that's because some power plants somewhere, and banks of CPUs and GPUs and under C-cables are overheating to deliver that because it's been built wrong badly. So reducing the carbon overhead of those kinds of problems is super valuable. Yes, the study that I always called, or I always hear, is back in 2006, I was in found that every 100 milliseconds that had a page load time, it cost them 1% in sales. And that was a massive leaked study, but I haven't heard kind of a better example of page speed effect since then. I think Nielsen did a really good one in 2021, ish, I can't remember what it was called, but they found a study of a few hundred sites of different nerd niches, and they found the same kind of stats, which was really nice. The other angle here, which I think is potentially more useful, but yeah, is that nobody sets out to build a slow site, it's not a design decision, so it's an accidental thing that happens. And what happens when you start to unpick and fix site speed is you actually open up the, and you find all the skeletons in the closet, what you discover is that actually your, your CTO has outmoded opinions on how FUNC should load or your development team don't know about modern CSS standards, or you have a connection to a third party partner that haven't been updated in 10 years. And the process of going through and think how do we make this faster fixes the organization in a hundred ways that would never have happened otherwise and you start to optimize for quality of you to experience rather than just how to reshape minute seconds off because it forces us awkward conversations. That's the real impact really valuable. And as an SEO, how do you actually determine which skeleton to attack first? That's the challenge with all of us, you've got finite resources and priorities and everybody's very busy doing their day job, none of which is about focusing on quality, like nobody owns quality, so you're coming in from the outside saying here's 38 things that nobody and please, please, can I buy you, and cupcakes to do them. And always the answer is try and make a compelling business case, try and get buy in from us, high up the organization as you can because you can get the CEO bought in and get them to put pressure down once that's far easier than you begging at the tables, try and put pressure upwards. That is hard, but I think that's the case of all us here, you are always going to be an outsider begging for crumbs or quality control and focus and improvements and you're getting good at that. I think it's probably the most important skill for us here. Of course, if Google is quite good at accepting media or Christine, then up and coming search engines, maybe AI driven search engines can handle JavaScript as well can handle bloat as well and end up not featuring you in answers because of it. Yeah, and that's the bit that I think people should be really concerned about. I think so much of our model, that as you're mentally, this seems that I can sell a million pages on the internet and drive a million visits to every single one of them and maybe convert a few. And now suddenly you have the system which are making qualitative assessments of your pages and your brands and if they don't like what they don't see, you don't get the access to that audience and you don't get the ability to drive millions of people to them. So I think you get one shot to prove that your content is rather than meaningful and good and performant and if they struggle to pass that HTML, if they can't find the content on the page because it's hidden behind 20 megabytes of JavaScript. Or if they can't understand it when they do get it because it's buried in a trillion lines of in line CSS or broken, division, HTML structure. You miss out on the opportunity to get in front of the audience. I think hopefully these systems get better at passing and understanding the kind of web that we built by don't see it happening anytime soon. So I think people doing the real kind of critical evaluation of when you turn off JavaScript and when you look at the HTML source code. And you assume that your machine trying to pick out the gems of value. How easy is that? How clean is that? How straightforward is that? And if it's like waiting through soup. It's going to be the same experience that Chunchy PT and other systems have. I think yeah, now is the time to be assessing that. I guess it depends on the type of soup that you're talking about, but I get the picture. In terms of maybe where it fits into an overall SEO strategy. So if you've just started as a pet of SEO in an organization, you're wanting to make an impact. You can get bogged down a little bit by this and obviously it can take a while to actually get developers to make changes and actually measure the impacts of the changes that have been made. So should this be maybe within the first month, the first three months of you starting within the new role. And if so, how much time should you spend on doing this and relation to other activities to demonstrate the impact that you're having. I love that you've already you've stumbled into the trap, which is you're saying it takes so much time for developers to prioritize this. And do the issue is that's because the thing is already bad that shouldn't be normal. It should be trivially easy to make changes. Things like I know XML, like that's canonical URLs, a truck line, alt tags on the images, all of these things should take minutes, not months. And the fact that we've normalized the take months, the months is because of these broken technical cultures because we've got to develop experience because people are comfortable in their jobs. And if there are 12 developers, when they might only need to be three. It's in no none of their interests to be more efficient. So I think getting good at understanding what good website development looks like and how those processes work. What is involved in changing that H2 to an H3 or excluding thing for me, XML, site map, if it's a Tuesday, understanding how those kinds of logical structures and systems work in the web gives you a lot of leverage to have grown up conversations with developers and say there shouldn't take months. And then yeah, in your role that in day one at the new organization, you can say, it is a problem that our site takes six seconds to load here at the bottlenecks. Why can't we fix that this afternoon? Don't know what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today. What's the key takeaway make your websites better and don't accept that them being broken and Jackie is okay. Don't order something that is an independent technical SEO consultants find out more over at journal odorson.com. Don't know thanks so much for being part of SEO in 2026. Thanks for having me. I've been your host David Bain. Get your copy of SEO in 2026, the book over at SEO in 2026.com.