When building a website, understand that your site’s speed is crucial for its growth. It impacts your search engine positioning, bounce rate, conversion rate, and User Experience (UX). To make sure your site runs smoothly, you can start by choosing an excellent hosting provider. When looking for one, inspect its server’s speed and uptime first and foremost.
This article will help you check if your provider is helping or hurting you by looking at the two said elements. Also, we’ve covered the five easy tips you can do to optimize your site’s speed.
How Does Speed Affect SEO?
Google has announced that page speed is one of its main indexing factors. This is because fast websites are easier to crawl and provide a better user experience. When your site has been indexed, Google will start showing it on the search results. Now, this is your starting point to get your website on the first page.
Of course, you need to have high-quality content to boost your ranking. However, it’s your page speed that determines if your visitors will actually stay on your site and read your content.
The statistics reveal that 40% of users will leave a website that takes longer than three seconds to load.
Unsurprisingly, the higher your bounce rate, the bigger the possibility to rank low on the search engines. Also, your bounce rate will increase by 106% for every six-second delay. Thus, you need to maintain your site’s stellar performance to keep your standing on the search results.
Investing in an excellent web hosting service is the primary step to make sure your site runs at light speed. Like no matter how hard you try to optimize your website’s speed, your effort won’t pay if the problem is on the server-side.
How Does Website Uptime Affect SEO
Website uptime is the accumulation of how long your website is available online. Suppose your site goes down every other month. In that case, search engines will mark your site as unreliable.
While 99.5% sounds like a great uptime, your site’s downtime will be 1.83 days per year with this percentage. This number is still a little risky. As you don’t want to get Google bots to crawl your page during downtime, you need to minimize it as much as possible.
Opt for at least a 99.9% uptime guarantee. For that, you can check your provider’s server uptime before you decide to go with it.
How to Optimize Your Website?
By this point, you’ve learned that the site’s speed is one of the ranking factors on Google. Further, you also find out that your hosting provider can make or break your site’s performance. Thus, you need to choose wisely.
Now, let’s hear the five tips from seo expert, Johnny Chen of johnnychenmedia.com on what you can do to optimize your website’s performance. Note that the following tips are mostly for WordPress. However, they’ll all work on any platform though you may need to tweak the step a bit.
Without further ado, let’s dive into the five tips for how to optimize your website.
Keep Your CMS Up-to-Date
Software updates carry improved performance, and the Content Management System (CMS) is no different. In fact, updating your CMS core is the most basic thing you can do to boost your overall website performance. Apart from that, updating your CMS is also a means of keeping your site secure.
If you use WordPress, you can update the CMS from the Updates menu on your dashboard. Also, we recommend checking it regularly to make sure you don’t miss any notifications.
Remove Unnecessary Plugins and Scripts
While plugins can help you extend your site’s functionality, using too many of them can make your site sluggish. This is because some plugins may be poorly coded, so they add significant weight to your page. On top of that, you may not always need them.
Thus, it’s recommended to disable unused plugins from your website. By keeping your site uncluttered, you can remove the unnecessary bits that slow your site down.
Optimize Images
From providing a scenario to visualizing data, images help engage your blog readers and site visitors. As a result, you can boost your User Experience (UX) score.
However, unoptimized images can be the biggest culprit in making your website take forever to load. Therefore, you need to reduce your image sizes before uploading them to your website.
For that, you can utilize a lossless compression tool, as it allows you to reduce file sizes while maintaining its quality. Also, we recommend using this tool for images that function as a focal point. Thus, it won’t look pixelated when displayed.
Some of the excellent lossless compression tools to try are TinyPNG and Smush. The latter is a WordPress image optimization plugin that can compress your files as you upload them on your site.
Use Caching
Caching refers to a feature that saves your frequently-used site’s documents, like homepage and images, for faster retrieving. As a result, caches can minimize server lag and get your site to handle multiple requests at once.
You can install caching plugins to help you with the process. If you don’t know where to look, WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache are two of the excellent caching plugins for WordPress websites.
Use a CDN
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a globally distributed proxy server and data centre. When integrated into a CDN, your website can load faster in different places worldwide. This is because the network of servers gets your site’s files closer to your target audience, no matter how far they are with your site’s main server.
Suppose your target market is at the global level. In that case, it’s a must to use a CDN. You can integrate one through Cloudflare. It’s one of the great providers as it comprises full customization. Thus, you can adjust the settings to meet your site’s requirements.
Conclusion
The site’s speed is the foundation of your overall UX score. While numerous factors influence how your site performs, you’ve learned that it starts with an excellent hosting provider. With strong server-side performance, you can optimize your website’s speed and get it on any search engine’s first page. Good luck!
About the Author
Juliet Jones is an Editor at PRable.org, all in one content marketing agency. She loves creating articles about technology, innovative product reviews, and technical writing to help scale up digital growth. She is a writer by day and a frustrated singer by night.
