Improving Your Site Speed Improves SEO Rankings
It’s well known across the SEO industry that page speed is now a key search ranking factor. Speeding up your website doesn’t just improve your national and local SEO it also improves your user experience and can lead to more conversions.
For many searchers if a page doesn’t load within a few seconds they are likely to go elsewhere. So its really important that every single part of your website loads as fast as possible.
Whenever we start working with a new client we will always look at how there websites speed performance is affecting there user experience and search rankings. There is no point ranking at the top of google if your websites slow speed is killing your users experience. If your serious about improving your SEO rankings keep reading as we’ve got some great tips on speed optimisation.
How To Optimise Your Site Speed
There may be many reasons why your website is running slow.
So to start things off you’ll need to carry out some tests. Google has it’s own page speed test which is now known as the mobile friendly test which is always worth checking out to see if your site has any issues.
However across the SEO industry Gtmetix is considered the holy grail when it comes to analysing your websites overall site speed. So head over to gtmetrix, Type in your web address and click on analyse wait a few moments and you’ll get you’re results.
Notice at the top of the page where it says performance score you will have page speed score and yslow score you should be aiming for an grade of A for both.
The last site I worked on I managed to improve the page speed score to grade A 100% and yslow grade A 95% which is much faster than the current average website speeds of 70% and 68%.
On the right hand side there is a box including results for fully loaded time, total page size and requests. For each of these results lower means better.
Further down the page there are tabs with detailed recommendations to help improve your websites performance. Anything with a high priority and lower than grade A should be looked at urgently as this will be affecting your websites speed and search rankings. If you’re unsure how to fix the issues you should contact your local SEO company or web developer as they are usually a simple fix.
After finding out why your website is running slow you will probably be thinking of implementing some pretty big changes to your website here are a few you should be looking at.
Is your web hosting company fast enough?
Choosing a fast and reliable web hosting company can be key to making sure that your site runs as fast as possible. If you run a wordpress website I can recommend Wpengine, Flywheel and Vidahost the first two can be quite expensive if you run a small local business website. I personally use vidahost cloud hosting for a lot of my sites as they are inexpensive and have great customer service.
Is your wordpress theme slowing you down.
There are literally thousands of theme’s to choose from some better and faster than others. Personally I would recommend you find a theme that best suits you and your business and then optimise the hell out of it.
I’ve managed to get even an average performing theme like Udesign to score 100% and 97% in gtmetrix which is blazingly fast, I’ve also achieved similar results with themeforests number 1 selling theme Avada.
Are you using a Cache plugin?
If you run a wordpress site without some sort of cache plugin your missing out I personally use premium cache plugin WP-Rocket. It’s not free but it’s really easy to use, Blazing fast, works seamlessly with cloudflare and has great customer support should you ever encounter any issues.
If your after a free cache plugin go for either WP Super Cache or W3 Total cache. They are both really great cache plugins and if you spend the time to learn all the advanced features they can be just as fast as a premium plugin. Which will really help your SEO.
Content delivery network
I use at least the Free version of cloudflare (CDN) with all of my websites. Not only does a CDN speed up your websites performance it also improve your seo. it also helps keep your site secure and includes protection from ddos attacks. \
Setting up cloudflare is really simple once you’ve created an account and added your website. All you have to do is point your domain name servers to the cloudflare nameservers given to you in the cloudflare setup process. If your really struggling to get this setup your hosting company should be able to assist you. Once you’ve created an account with cloudflare.
Image Optimisation
Un-optimised images are usually one of the biggest causes for slow loading pages.
Optimising your images using a premium plugin like Imagify drastically reduces the size of each image without the loss of any quality so that they load faster on your website.
There are free plugins that can optimise images but in my opinion Imagify is the best out there and is really inexpensive considering how much it could help your SEO Cannock rankings and user experience.
Go And Get Optimising
Just by carrying out these simple steps to optimise your website. Will really help improve your conversions and SEO rankings. Remember to test your scores in Gtmetrix before and after you’ve optimised your site. I guarantee you’ll be amazed at how much faster your site will be.
