Quality matters, how we designed ReloadSEO
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When we started planning to develop ReloadSEO back in 2016, we also immediately decided on a few core principles that we wanted pursue:
1. Our service should always be available for our customers.
2. When Google changes its algorithm, our clients should have the latest SEO rules straight away.
3. The calculated SEO score of a product should always be up-to-date.
4. Our clients should feel safe using our product.
We made sure these rules were ingrained in our company. Although most of our clients may never notice the amount of work we put in to make sure we keep this level of service, we’d love to tell you a little about it!
1.Every change in a product is securely sent to our servers
In just the first 2 months alone after our launch, we calculated the SEO score of 150.000 unique products. When you use our ReloadSEO, every change you make in your product is securely sent to our servers over SSL.
Being able to calculate the latest SEO score and giving our clients the latest optimization rules, is one of our key features. This is why we sometimes calculate over 30.000 products per day!
2. We test everything
Test Driven Development (TDD) is a well known programming technique that we use on a daily basis. TDD makes sure that every code has a function and is tested thoroughly with one or more tests.
When we developed the algorithms that drive the SEO scoring and the suggestions API, we immediately saw the great benefit TDD brings to these kinds of situations. Recently, we’ve built a test suite with hundreds of different types of products, all testing a small part of our ranking algorithms.
As we keep adding and refining our systems, we’re able to say with confidence that our scores and suggestions are always up to date.
3. Monitor with new relic
Monitoring should be a key factor for any internet company (yes, webshops too!). A lot of webshops still don’t do any performance monitoring, so we strongly recommend a tool like New Relic to keep track of errors and slow page loads.
Our clients don’t want to wait for the latest SEO scores of their products. We have invested a lot to make sure our servers produce results within milliseconds. On average, our algorithms send back the SEO score and suggestions within just 40 ms!
And to make sure we keep this level of service, we do a lot of monitoring and keep a close eye on our response times with New Relic.
4. Cloudflare makes your life easier
We just love Cloudflare, because it makes our lives easier. As we have grown substantially over the last months, so have the threats we get from malicious computers and botnets. Cloudflare has helped us keep those threats far away from our servers.
If you haven’t tried Cloudflare yet for your webshops, we strongly encourage you to try it!
A few very good features of cloudflare:
• It can auto minify your Javascript, CSS and Html
• Caching out of the box on their extremely fast servers
• Instant DNS changes when you need it.
• Cool looking statistics (who doesn’t love numbers!)
• Its free!
5. Open source is key
The ReloadSEO plugin requires webshop owners to install a bit of code on their servers. To make sure our code is of the highest possible standard, we ask three Magento Gold Partners to evaluate our plugin before every release. Only when they give us the green light, we will release the plugin to our customers.
We also put our source code on Github, so everybody can check out the plugin and make sure the code is clean. A couple of our clients even helped us and add some great functionality!