You must be wondering.. what does speed have to do with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)? A couple of years ago we would have considered website speed to be a low ranking factor. But now with the boom of mobile devices, it is a must to have a fast loading website. Imagine waiting for a site to load for 1 minute before you start seeing the full images of the product you are interested in or service…
Not only is it important for your website to load quickly for your potential clients but it is important to Google!
Google sends little bugs/spiders to crawl your website. The faster these spiders can get through your pages the faster Google will index your site. The faster Google indexes your site the more likely Google is to rank your site higher than your competitor.
Some companies have seen a 20% increase in traffic by speeding up their website per month! Increasing your website speed does not have to be difficult or require you to have a technical background!
Here are a 10 free website speed test tips & how you can implement them today!
- Website speed test: Test your website speed using the free GTmetrix website speed test. Always test your site in Incognito. We consider this one of the best free speed site test out there. This will give you a clear indication of what you need to optimise.
- Make sure you are using a hosting provider like Siteground. Siteground is rated one of the best WordPress host in the world & we highly recommend using them!
- Use the SG Optimizer Plugin that comes free with your Siteground package.
- Once you have the SG Optimizer Plugin installed you can start optimising your site. Best of all – NO CODING NEEDED.
- Options to switch on within the plugin: Dynamic Catching, Memcached & Browser Caching, GZIP Compression. All of these you can implement by a click of a button.
- From a front end, perspective minify your CSS & Javascript.
- Optimise your images for the web. Make sure your images are not bigger than they need to be from a pixels perspective. You can use the SG Optimizer to auto optimise your images for you. Note thou, this will only do it to a certain level – so uploading your images correctly from the start is best practice.
- Lazy Load your images: This helps with mobile, images will only start loading once the person scrolls down and reaches the images. You can either use the SG Optimizer plugins or Google’s new “Native Lazy Load“.
- Once you have implemented all of the above “Purge SG Cache”. Then see the effects of the above implementation. You will see an instant improvement in website loading & speed.
- Test your site again via GXmetric & enjoy the HUGE Improvement!
Don’t forget to use Google Search Console to re-index your site. Give it a day or 2 & you should see improvements in your SEO ranking & see a boost in organic traffic.
Case Study
Clients Website Speed Before
After Implementation
If you need assistance in speeding up your site, generating more traffic & leads – Contact Us!
