Recently, a customer contacted me inquiring about steps they should take to improve their website speed.

This customer was adamant that their website ranking was greatly suffering because of it. While I agree with their assessment, let me be clear that ranking on page one of Google or any other search engine was not solely because of website performance or lack of.

Website performance is a factor, but not in this customer’s case. In fact, this customer’s overall website performance and SEO health put their competition to shame upon further review of keyword ranking, backlink profile, and domain authority.

Nevertheless, I discussed and walked the customer through a step-by-step process for what to check for to determine how to improve website performance, checking the following:

Emoji domains burst onto the scene over a year or so ago with a handful of domain investors, speculators, and hobbyists registering nearly 21,000 .WS emoji domains and a few hundred .TO emoji domains.

While the emoji domain craze has subsided with just under 1,500 .WS domains registered (best guess) and mostly single-character, the market for emoji domains has started the journey towards emoji marketing education and usage.

It’s been one week since I boarded a plane from Orlando heading back to good ole’ Austin, Texas.

I thought I’d take a moment to share a few thoughts and interactions from my MERGE! 2018 experience.

As the 2nd Annual MERGE! comes to a conclusion in it’s final day, there were many sessions, keynotes and connections to be had and made from Day One, Day Two and Day Three.

Conferences like MERGE! tend to move at a lightening speed in person while it can be perceived as a long time when seeing the outlay of time on paper.

Nevertheless, the final day of MERGE! kicked off with a pasties breakfast bar and keynote from Stefan Pretty, CEO Subbly.co, entitled “Bootstrappers do it better”.

Although many points were about about bootstrapping, one of the key takeaways from Stefan’s presentation was how bootstrappers should constantly ask the following 4 questions at every twist and turn in their journey:

With Day One and Day Two of MERGE! long gone, I had the pleasure of kicking off Day Three moderating the Domain Name Solutions for Blockchain Challenges panel which consisted of Jothan Frakes, Jebidiah Burnett, Toby Hall, Dave Evanson, and Jodee Rich.

Day Two opened the doors to many more exhibitors as well as a CMS Summit Keynote from Robert Jacobi, Executive Vice President of Perfect Dashboard.

As with Day One of MERGE!, the day was filled with many sessions and networking opportunities.

From Slither.io to Clothes.io to CodePen.io to a growing list of personal and company brands, .io domains have become the darling domain of tech startups and domain investors.

The Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for .io was originally assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory before tech world dubbed it “input/output” domain for the next great tech idea.

There have been and are many tech startups using a .io domain to brand their digital presence.