Google says it may 'slow-shame' websites with labels noting slow loading speeds

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Google says it may 'slow-shame' websites with labels noting slow loading speeds

Slow websites be warned!

Google recently revealed in a blog post that “in the future, Chrome may identify sites that typically load fast or slow for users with clear badging.”

Given that slow websites are already a deterrent to consumers, now may be a perfect time to optimize your site, say experts.

“It’s all about speed for consumers on the web,” says Holger Mueller, a vice president and principal analyst at Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research, a tech research and advisory firm. “Consumers deserve and want faster websites.”

While load time can be impacted by various factors, generally speaking, anything under two or three seconds is considered fast, he says.

If Google moves forward with badging, “it’s a significant change in transparency,” says Mueller.

The Nov. 11 blog post said badging “may take a number of forms and we plan to experiment with different options, to determine which provides the most value to our users.”

The post also stated that Google’s “plan to identify sites that are fast or slow will take place in gradual steps, based on increasingly stringent criteria. Our long-term goal is to define badging for high-quality experiences, which may include signals beyond just speed.”

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It showed as an example a page with a red triangle with a message that says "usually loads slow."

Google didn’t respond to queries from Newsday for further comment.

“As far as guidelines and implementation, this is not a done deal,” says Liz Miller, a vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. “This is an opening shot across the bow.”

Google needs to provide further details, but if badging does happen “it could be a huge negative” for a site to be labeled slow, she said, adding, “regardless of a badge or anyone slow-site 'shaming,' there’s a business impact here if you have sites that are poorly loading and poorly performing.”

But she says most small businesses should be OK if they built their website using some type of platform that is fairly modern.

“Small businesses shouldn’t freak out right now,” but they also shouldn’t ignore the underlying reason why Google wants to do this, Miller says.

It’s Google’s job to offer up the best sites to users.

Google offers a free tool to test web speed and suggest improvements called Google’s PageSpeed Insights , says Scott Darrohn, a managing partner at fishbat,  a digital marketing firm in Patchogue.

It gives you an overall score from 0 to 100, he says, noting 90 to 100 is optimal.

Some culprits that slow down a website are videos and images, Darrohn says.

If you want to use video, he suggests creating a Vimeo channel and uploading your videos directly there and then pulling your videos from Vimeo onto your own website rather directly uploading them from your phone to your website.

This is because the video is streamed from Vimeo’s servers rather than your own server, generally resulting in a quicker load time, he says, noting he does this for his own website.

He also uses gzip, a software application used for file compression, which can also speed up your site.

On the back end, he suggests limiting the number of page redirects from old landing pages to new landing pages and also looking at the server your website’s hosted on and how many other websites are on that server, which can impact performance.

Dean DeCarlo, president of Mission Disrupt, a Huntington Village-based digital marketing agency, says when he gets a new client it’s not uncommon for their site to have up to a seven-second load time, which he then helps reduce.  

Even without badging it’s wise to quicken load time, he says, noting “speed is heavily counted in SEO rankings.”

For many businesses, it doesn’t mean completely revamping your website but rather maintaining it, he said. He agrees images are a top reason sites run slow, due to files being too large and needing to be compressed.

Tools like WP Smush and TinyPNG can help with image compression, he said.

Also having too many plug-ins (a software add-on to expand the functionality of an existing program) might slow down a site, as well as having image carousels that automatically display images on your site, DeCarlo said, noting you can speed up a site by instead having people manually click on the images to view.

Fast Fact:

Nearly 70% of consumers say page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.

Source: Unbounce’s 2019 Page Speed Report

02

Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Google's Sundar Pichai, fall out of top-10 in annual ranking of CEOs

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When it comes to being a great CEO, success is all about the company culture you create.

That’s what career data website Comparably found among the winners of its annual Best CEOs awards. These awards rank the top 50 best CEOs for large companies, and the top 50 best for small and midsize companies. To get these results, Comparably fielded over 10 million anonymous employee ratings from over 50,000 companies. 

The top spots this year didn’t go to a big tech CEOs such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. or Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.  Instead, the number one spot went to the likes of Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom Video Communications, a cloud computing company that specializes in communications software, and Brian Halligan, CEO of the marketing software company HubSpot. 

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“(Yuan) is applauded by his team for being a visionary and transparent leader, in addition to putting a real focus on the overall happiness of employees,” said Comparably CEO Jason Nazar. 

Nazar gave similar praise to Halligan, whom Nazar said “is seen as a thought leader when it comes to building amazing culture for employees while driving incredible customer satisfaction, business results, and investor returns."

The rise of these CEOs has coincided with the decline of Bezos, who fell from the sixth best CEO in 2018, to 41st in this year’s ranking. Google’s Pichai, who was ranked third in 2018, moved down to 13 this year.

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“There has been a bit of a general backlash against big tech which has understandably affected employee sentiment,” Nazar said. “We're approaching an election season where workers' rights are an essential issue and it is affecting some high-profile CEOs.”

Still, these awards are meant to showcase the best in how companies are run, and any of the CEOs that make the list are still great, according to Nazar.

“It's important to note that (Bezos and Google’s Sundar Pichai) are still ranked by employees as among the Top 50 Best CEOs,” Nazar said. “Although their ratings have gone down slightly from the previous year, they still stand out as two exemplary leaders."

Here are Comparably's full findings:

1. Eric Yuan, Zoom Video Communications

2. Brian Halligan, HubSpot

3. W. Craig Jelinek, Costco

4. Satya Nadella, Microsoft

5. John Legere, T-Mobile

6. Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn

7. Charles Butt, H.E.B

8. Kevin Lobo, Stryker

9. Bert Bean, Insight Global

10. Lynn Jurich, Sunrun

11. Sasan Goodarzi, Intuit

12. Mark Mader, Smartsheet

13. Sundar Pichai, Google

14. Ryan Smith, Qualtrics

15. Craig Menear, The Home Depot

16. Alex Shootman, Workfront

17. Carlos Rodriguez, ADP

18. Corie Barry, Best Buy

19. Jay Kreps, Confluent

20. John Van Siclen, Dynatrace

21. Mahe Bayireddi, Phenom People

22. Bryce Maddock, TaskUs

23. Daniel Dines, UiPath

24. Arne Sorenson, Marriott

25. Mihir Shukla, Automation Anywhere

26. William Wagner, LogMeIn

27. Albert DiLeonardo, Vector Marketing

28. Doug Mack, Fanatics

29. Steve Bilt, Smile Brands 

30. Colin Doherty, Fuze

31. Robert Quattrocchi, Northside Hospital

32. Shoaib Makani, KeepTruckin

33. Jim Loree, Stanley Black & Decker

34. Logan Green, Lyft

35. Sam Gilliland, Cherwell Software

36. Dan Curtis, BNSF Logistics

37. Kelly Caruso, Shipt

38. Mark Marron, ePlus inc. 

39. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

40. Patrick Pacious, Choice Hotels

41. Jeff Bezos, Amazon

42. Ed Bastian, Delta Air Lines

43. Tracey Fellows, Realtor.com

44. Harley Lippman, Genesis10

45. Brian Niccol, Chipotle

46. John Beatty, Clover Network

47. Timothy Cook, Apple

48. Marillyn Hewson, Lockheed Martin

49. Mark Clemens, Golden Hippo

50. Jonathan Neman, Sweetgreen

1. Mark Faggiano, TaxJar

2. Sam Malouf, Malouf

3. Robert Sadow, Scoop Technologies

4. Brandon Rodman, Weave HQ

5. Steve Carlson, ForwardLine Financial

6. Alexander Austin, Branch Metrics

7. Michael Hanson, Alkami

8. Jason Purcell, Salsify

9. Peter McKay, Snyk

10. Douglas Winter, Seismic

11. David Cancel, Drift

12. Kyle Porter, SalesLoft

13. Karl Mehta, EdCast

14. Vineet Jain, Egnyte

15. Sandy Gibson, Better Place Forests

16. Michael Rowell, Assurance

17. Howard Brown, RingDNA

18. Brady Brim-DeForest, Theorem

19. Chris Hulls, Life360

20. Greg Besner, CultureIQ

21. John Wise, InvestCloud

22. Dustin Moskovitz, Asana

23. Didier Elzinga, CultureAMP

24. Ryan Malone, SmartBug Media

25. Daniel Chait, Greenhouse Software, Inc.

26. Gleb Polyakov, Nylas

27. Mitch Thrower, Events.com

28. Erik Huberman, Hawke Media

29. David Johnson, Vervent

30. Giuseppe Incitti, Sitetracker

31. Alex Goode, GoSite

32. Flint Brenton, CollabNet

33. Kyle Sherman, Flowhub

34. Brian Hartnack, Archer Education

35. Dave Evans, Fictiv

36. Amir Movafaghi, Mixpanel

37. Elizabeth Cholawsky, HG Insights

38. Joel Hyatt, Globality

39. Daniel Yanisse, Checkr

40. Katherine Power, Who What Wear

41. Stephane Donze, AODocs

42. John Benson, Verisys Corpotation

43. Bob Young, Lulu Press

44. Simon Anderson, Mission

45. Ashvin Kumar, Tophatter

46. Joanna McFarland, HopSkipDrive

47. John Crum, Seaman Corporation

48. Lidia Yan, NEXT Trucking

49. Gil Elbaz, Factual 

50. Reid Lappin, Vokal

Methodology

Comparably Awards are derived from sentiment ratings provided by employees who anonymously rated their employers on Comparably.com between November 19, 2018 and November 19, 2019. There were no fees or costs associated with participating, nor was nomination required. To qualify, Large companies (more than 500 employees) must have a minimum of 75 employee participants and Small/Mid-Size companies (fewer than 500 employees) must have a minimum of 25 employee participants. Winners were determined based on CEO ratings. The answer to each question was given a numerical score and then compared to companies of similar size across the U.S. Additional weight was given to scores at companies with more participation from their employee base. The final data set was compiled from nearly 10 million ratings across 50,000 U.S. companies on Comparably.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Google's Sundar Pichai, fall out of top-10 in annual ranking of CEOs

03

Google and Facebook Not in 2020 Top 10 Best Places to Work. Which Companies Took Their Spots?

Glassdoor has released its annual "Best Places to Work" list, and two of the world's most prominent companies fell out of the top 10.

Facebook and Google — ranked 7th and 8th respectively in 2019 — have been bumped out of the leading list for the upcoming year. Facebook now ranks at #23, while Google ranks #11 for 2020.

Both companies espouse luxuries fit for a 21st-century workplace, and have the capital to back it up: Giant corporate compounds, open floor plans, yoga rooms and nap areas. So who took their spots?

Companies that weren't previously ranked in the top 10 but now do include: HubSpot, DocuSign, Sammons Financial Group, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Intuitive Surgical, Ultimate Software and VIPKid.

Historically, Facebook and Google have been powerhouses on Glassdoor's list. There have been aberrations when either company placed outside of the top-10 within the last decade, but 2020 is the first year since 2010 where Facebook and Google both didn't make the top 10. (In 2010, Facebook was unlisted and Google ranked #14.)

In 2018, Facebook ranked #1 and Google ranked #5.

In 2017, Facebook ranked #2 and Google ranked #4.

In 2016, Facebook ranked #5 and Google ranked #8.

In 2015, Facebook ranked #13 and Google ranked #1.

In 2014, Facebook ranked #5 and Google ranked #8.

In 2013, Facebook ranked #1 and Google ranked #6.

In 2012, Facebook ranked #3 and Google ranked #5.

In 2011, Facebook ranked #1 and Google ranked #30.

Glassdoor's methodology for the list is based on employees. According to Glassdoor, "winners are determined based on feedback provided by those who really know a company best — the employees. If employees don't share reviews on Glassdoor during the year-long eligibility timeframe, an employer cannot be considered."

Criteria for the rankings stem from three principles:

Quantity of reviews. Employees submit company reviews that measure "overall company rating, career opportunities, compensation & benefits, culture & values, senior management, work/life balance, recommend to a friend and six-month business outlook." Glassdoor's review panel also accounts for companies size and employment status of employees giving the review.

Quality of reviews. Glassdoor's "proprietary awards algorithm" takes into account the subjective qualities of responses.

Consistency of reviews. The awards algorithm looks at trends of reviews over time.

Technology companies such as Facebook and Google have taken a major hit in the eyes of Americans recently, according to a 2019 Pew Study. From 2015 to 2019, positive views of tech companies' overall impact on America went from 71% to 50%. People who thought tech companies' impact on America was negative nearly doubled, rising from 17% to 33%.

Facebook and Google are still in the top 100 for 2020. Facebook and Google did not immediately respond to Newsweek's request for comment. Other companies that have fallen out of the top-10 include Zoom Video Communications, Procure Technologies, LinkedIn and Lululemon.

HubSpot, a Massachusetts-based company that develops software products for marketing and sales, took the #1 ranking.

Glassdoor's 2020 Top 10 Best Places to Work rankings are as follows:

1. HubSpot

2. Bain & Company

3. DocuSign

4. In-N-Out Burger

5. Sammons Financial Group

6. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

7. Intuitive Surgical

8. Ultimate Software

9. VIPKid

10. Southwest Airlines