Announcing a way to make your Author Buzz site faster and a way to target mobile users with speically written content. Today we have added two exciting new features – one of which was written by Google.

Faster content for better SEO

Google make no secret of the fact that faster loading and more responsive sites will rank better. Ranking better means more visitors. More visitors can mean more book sales.

That is why – after some trial and error in testing – we have selected a feature to optimise your image sizes (and make your pages load faster).

This feature is called Smush. Smush is a third party plugin that can make your images as small as they can get without loss of image quality.

You may need to babysit your site during “bulck smushing”. This is because the free version that you default to has to be restarted ever 50 images. If you want to upgrade to pro, talk to us first, as we need to do a few things our end to get you access. Although, if I am honest, the free version is plenty good enough.

Google-powered mobile-first content

Google has designed a new thing. They are calling their thing “web stories”. If you have seen stories on Facebook or other social sites, you already know roughly what a story is.

The Google powered web story is content that can be seen on Google’s Discover app on mobiles. Stories are a whole new way to reach your audience.

If writing a whole new kind of content seems hard, don’t worry. We have a Google written drag and drop story creator. The Author Buzz story maker (more like google’s Story Maker on Author Buzz) is found in your admin area sidebar. Probably just under comments.

We will be writing a lot more about web stories over the next few months. These guides will be on the main Author Buzz blog.