Content is king when it comes to website positioning in search engines but speed is the new queen from 2017 onward...

Important Factors to Consider when Building a New Website or Updating an Existing Website

Speed

Google is determined to serve pages / content as quickly as possible and in the coming months the search engine giant will be pressing to get Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) established as the way forward for delivering content as rapidly as possible. AMP is an open source project designed to help deliver content instantly on mobile devices. It could be said that the way AMP works is contradictory to the direction we've been heading but it's worth keeping an eye on how much effort Google puts into this.

Recently the emphasis has been on responsive website design that delivers the same content to both mobile and desktop devices but Google could turn all this on its head because of the need to deliver content quickly to mobile devices that may not always be connecting to the internet over high speed internet connections. You can read more about Google AMP here...

Security

The ability to deliver your content securely is likely to be a major factor in 2017 / 2018 as some new features being employed by Google will require that HTTPS - the secure version of HTTP. HTTPS requires a SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate to be in place, that effectively verifies the content. The 'S' part of HTTPS means the content will be delivered over an encrypted connection. Google wants this as it creates an overall safer web environment.

Mobile-First Design

Harking back to speed in one sense but mainly to do with the responsiveness of a website, 'Mobile-First' is the mantra for 2017. It doesn't mean putting desktop considerations second and it doesn't mean compromising on quality of design. It's more to do with the behaviour of your site on smart phones and tablets and how that transfers to desktop devices.

Static Web Apps

The basic principle of a Static Web App is that user interaction is delivered via the browser rather than the server. It's an interesting approach as it means that we can still deliver dynamic content but in a much faster way. Read more about Static Web Apps here...