Almost every agency is going to tell you to invest in your SEO, but a great agency is going to make sure you know that your SEO performance is a two sided coin. If the point of SEO is to get as many eyes on your content as possible, wouldn’t it make sense to try to ensure that the website page you’re trying to rank is ready to convert?
If you can believe it, the performance of your website is directly linked to your SEO performance.
Aside from scanning your keyword content, search engines are taking how your website performs into account when returning your ranking. Simply put, a slow website is a KILLER for your SEO performance. We’ve seen it a thousand times. Really well designed websites, with great content that load incredibly slow on desktop, and even slower on mobile. So what’s the fix? Thankfully, it’s a fairly simple process to remove the bloat from your site and boost your site AND boost your SEO performance. Here are a few simple tricks almost any website can use.
Cut the Fat.
Site Speed, from the perspective of the site user, is going to arguably have the most effect on their first time experience, either positively or negatively. So what’s the culprit when it comes to a slow site? We call it bloat, or excessive and unnecessary website weight. We’ll be genuinely shocked the first time we come across a site that doesn’t have ANY unnecessary weight to it. For most businesses, it will be common that the site is any combination of a WordPress site, or a Shopify store, or a hardcoded HTML/CSS/JS build, and almost all of them could use a once over to cut down on image size, or jquery calls, or plugins that could be dragging the site speed down.
It’s important to think about the size of your site in small increments. While you may not have any huge files on your website, the compilation of smaller files can be almost more deadly than one big file. Equally, the number of times scripts that need to be called may not seem excessive, but something like Google Pagespeed will measure your site’s performance down to milliseconds. And every millisecond counts. Now that we know how important site size can be, let’s tackle some of the common problem areas.
The Smaller, The Better.
A great way to keep your site speed up is to minify your site’s files. File minification is the process of minimizing the code and markup used on your website. Often this will remove any white space in your site’s code, or get rid of any code comments that a developer may have put in during the build stage to assist themselves or their team. Spacing and comments can be great for keeping things clean in development, but servers don’t need them when you’re in a live environment. Minifying your site files gives servers the ability to “speed read” your code, and load your site faster for your users.
Balance Pretty and Performance
There is no doubt that the images you use on your website can make all the difference on how a user interacts with your site, but image size can be a lead weight dragging down your site’s performance. The absolute best way to make sure that your images have been optimized for web is to prepare the files for website viewing at the start. Whether you’re saving files from Photoshop, or prepping them with an image optimizer, saving the right image files for the right purpose at the right resolution can give you a huge boost in site speed.
There are also plugins for WordPress, Shopify and other platforms that will compress your images even further by removing metadata on the images and allow for Lazy Loading. Lazy load basically says to the server “Wait to load the image until the user needs to see it”. This allows the server to load only what the user sees on screen when they land on your site, as opposed to loading every single image on the site from the start. This is a great way of both keeping your site visually appealing, and limiting the requests your server needs to act on when your site loads.
Keep Plugins to a Minimum
For sites that are built on platforms like WordPress, Shopify, Etc., plugins can be a great way to add functionality to your site without having to invest heavily in development. There is a plugin for just about everything from E-Commerce to Customer engagement and beyond, and it is EXTREMELY easy to let your plugin installations get out of hand, and every plugin is an extra bit of weight added to your site. When choosing a plugin for your site, it is critical that you define the specific details of what you want that functionality to achieve. More often than not, we see two, three or four plugins that are all trying to solve individual pieces of a larger problem. While there may not always be one solution that solves the whole problem, cutting those four plugins down to two that solve the larger problem can cut a lot of weight from your site. It is a great practice to constantly review your plugins and ask yourself what you need out of them. Deactivating and deleting unused plugins keep your site running smooth and fast.
Use Delivery Shortcuts
A Content Delivery Network, or CDN, is a network of servers placed at different locations around the world that work together to deliver content more quickly to users based on their location. Think about needing to grab an item from a room in your house. If the item you need to grab is all the way in the back of the house, it’s going to take you longer to get to it than if it were in the next room. Using a CDN is like putting your web content in the user’s next room, so when a server calls your content, it gets to the user more quickly. These servers will also cache your content on the closest server to your users, so any time they revisit your site, your site will load even faster than it did on their first visit. This is a great way to increase site speed, even after you’ve done all the right things to optimize your web content like file minification and image optimization.
Boost Your SEO Performance with an Optimized Website
Although this may not be the complete recipe to boost your SEO performance, a website optimized for speed is a huge part of your SEO success. Remove all the roadblocks that hinder servers from getting your content in front of your users as quickly as possible, so your users can focus on your value, not your load time.
If you’re not sure how ready your website is to convert organic traffic to loyal customers, contact us today to see how Ezzey can help put your website on overdrive!