As someone currently working from home and involved with a lot of SMEs, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what that might mean. Based on my own experience, there are various ways in which it might make our economy far more efficient going forwards.

We've long used compression to optimise images but today, we're introducing two big updates to the way images are served on all SITEHUB sites. This should lead to a significant reduction in load times for all sites on the platform. The speed of your site is important for usability, particular if your target audience are likely to be using mobile devices or slow connections. Since 2017, Google also use it as a ranking factor, making it important for SEO. WebP Images WebP is an image format developed by Google. It uses an advanced image compression algorithm to further reduce the size of JPG and PNG images by approximately 30%. More information is available from Google . From today, most images will be automatically converted into WebP format before publication. Automatic Image Resizing As well as reducing the file size, we're adjusting the size of images to fit their containers. There are pros and cons to this approach as it can sometimes mean loading multiple variants of the same image; but it almost always results in faster individual page loads which is what matters from an SEO perspective. We're currently rolling this out across any existing sites on the platform. Can't wait? Simply login to the editor and hit 'republish'.

Dynamic pages are pages which are automatically generated from a database. For example, an estate agent might want to list hundreds of properties on the website at any given time. The manpower cost of creating an individual page for each and every one would be huge, so the solution is to put that information into a spreadsheet and have the website automatically (dynamically) create pages based on that. Before now, this meant maintaining a spreadsheet on Google Sheets or the excellent Airtable. Both options are still available but, as of today, you can create that database of information from inside SITEHUB itself. This means there's no additional cost, no need to train employees on third party software and no need to rely on software which could change its feature set or increase its cost at any time.