Working with developers to align on technical and SEO priorities is a challenge faced by many in-house SEOs, and by SEO agencies offering recommendations. How do we start conversations and support initiatives that get developers and SEOs all working towards the same goal? Is Core Web Vitals the common ground we need?
In this conversation with Moz Developer, Lucas Rasmussen, we explore his recent project aimed at improving our A/B testing experience and how it overlapped with Core Web Vitals.
Question: What is your role at Moz?
Lucas: I’m a Web Developer at Moz. I manage the Moz website and content management system (CMS).
Question: What was the main objective of your recent Cloudflare project?
Lucas: I started a project based around making an A/B testing suite for the Moz website that focused on improving split test results and a better more consistent visitor experience. The problem we had to solve was to run client side A/B tests without a different customer/page experience. When someone loads the page as part of an A/B test, the page flashes white for a split second and it affects the experience, which affects the overall validity of the test. We wanted to do better for Moz.
We chose to create a system using Cloudflare, where Cloudflare automatically shows two different types of pages. This way we could build a system where the A/B test page loads just as fast as if it wasn’t an experiment.
I had an ambitious goal of getting average page load time across the whole site down to two seconds.
Question: How long did it take from ideation to completion?
Lucas: All-in-all it took around 2-3 weeks to complete with an additional two weeks of planning. This also involved changes with our CMS, and a