Website Speed Tips for Search Engine Visibility
SEO Part 5 – Is your Website Mobile-Friendly?
PART 6 – Website Speed and Structure Tips for Search Engine Visibility
Google feels the need for speed when it comes to websites. They don’t like slow pages at all because when Google bots crawl your site, they like to crawl the most pages they can in a limited amount of time.
If your site is fast, it means that Google can quickly check out the updated content and get your content listed and ranked. Your site’s communication is done through browsers.
A customer’s browser reaches out to your site’s server when they go to the site. What happens next is that your server answers the request to view the content. This exchange between the audience’s browser and your server should take place within seconds.
How fast is your website?
Google likes sites to load in 1 or 2 seconds. You can test your website’s speed by using a free speed checker. Google has one or you can use another free one. If your site is running too slow, then you know you have work to do in order to boost search engine approval.
Google wants your pages to load fast and will even check them for you using their PageSpeed Insights and then tell you what you need to do to speed them up. Check your speed here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights.
Structure your website for speed.
Allow file compression by having a software application that does this for your site. When a site is compressed, the load results are faster.
Sometimes your website might be loading slowly because of hosting issues. If that’s a problem that you’re having, then the only two options for you are to notify the company about the server and if you still have issues, change hosts.
One thing that can slow a website’s loading time down is the size of the images. Larger images can drag down speed. Make the file size smaller. When using graphics or images, use PNGs or JPEGs, since these will load faster.
GIFs can slow pages quite a bit. It’s best not to use GIFs and instead use a visual format that can get your point across but won’t bog down your site like a jpg or png.
Videos load faster if you compress the file size. Handbrake is an open source video compressing tool.
The number of plugins you have on your website may also have an impact. Their impact depends on how many you have and what they process on your site. Some plugins have a reputation for causing slow loading.
This blog post may help you sort out which of your plugins may be the culprit: https://onlinemediamasters.com/how-to-find-wordpress-plugins-slowing-down-your-site/
Optimizing your Website for Speed
Learning how to optimize your site for the search engines can seem like a daunting task. But it’s really just some proper set-up and navigation strategies that are easy to carry out over the years.
The WP for Beginners expert Website has a great blog post that walks you through the process of speeding up your site:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/wordpress-performance-speed/
Testing your website Speed – How fast is it?
Google website speed test. There are several free sites that will give you this information. Then, if you need some help, let me know! Together we can figure it out!
Do you need help with your website speed?
Schedule a time to chat. I would be happy to do a free assessment for you.
Join me also in my upcoming Blogging Course where I will share more details and tips.
To your Success!
Terry
Soon to be published our updated E-Book for SEO containing these blog posts and more.
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