This day and age, with so much fierce competition, not only does your website have to look good to stand out from the crowd, but if it doesnt function correctly and if its load time is too slow, Search Engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo will not rank you very well in their SERPS (Search Engine Result Page).
Search engines consider their users (people searching the internet) their customers. They want the very best experience for their customers and no matter how popular your website is, how good it looks and how useful your information, if it isn’t optimised to load fast enough, or their are too many errors on the page, the search engines will not consider you a very good experience for their customers.
So what can you do to make your website perform better? There are many things you can do, but outlined below are th ones you should think about and consider first. Speed is not everything, but its a big part of it and if your website is loading quickly enough, most of the search engines will think that it is healthy.
Images Sizes
The sizes of images can be one of the biggest contributing factors to having a slow website.
Images come in all shapes and sizes and all different formats. A lot of the image weight and size is for information you can not see, and for data you do not need, Of course your image quality has to look good, but the difference between a good image and a very good image nmight be negleable and not worth slowing your website down for.
There are many free and paid for programs out there which can help you adjust the size and quality of your images quickly.
If you are using WordPress you can try:
Website Malware
Yes, even your website can get a virus, and when it does it can be a lot harder to rmove than if you was to get one on your laptop, computer or PC.
Search engines know when you are infected. You might have noticed it yourself if your site is loading very slowly or your pages are redirecting your customers to other websites. If this happens expect a huge ban or slide in search engine rankings!
Many people who get website viruses result in a total loss of their website and a loss in Search Engine ranking.
This is why it is very important to always backup your website. The problem is though, when people backup, sometimes they end up backing the virus also and even if they did not it can take years to get your ranking back up with Google or Bing.
The good news is there are very good antivirus malware protection programs for WordPress such as Wordfence and Sucuri Security.
Consider Minifying HTML, CSS & JavaScript
Gone are the days when websites needed only basic HTML to run and compete with one another.
Websites are much more advance now and need CSS for styling and Java Scripting for functionality. These coding languages are turned basic boring static websites into advanced viewing and functionality but come at a cost.
They will slow down you website significantly, sometimes by 3 times the amount. A lot of people will not wait 10 seconds for a website and will opt to leave and the search engines know this also.
What you need to to is cut out a lot of the unnecessary scripting and code in you website to make it run just as good without loosing functionality.
You might be able simply move the offending files into your header or tell your site to load content first to get around this.
Use Web Caching
Caching is one of the best ways to make your website run much much faster.
Rather than have your website generate new pages as they are requested from the web server every time, caching can store them and upload them to your customers increasing the load times significantly.
There are many programs in Wordpress which can help you with this such as WP-Rocket, Supercache and W3 Total Cache.
These same programs can help you with Minification and other things in relation to making your website run a lot faster.
However, not one shoe fits all and you have to be very careful when you do this and you can ruin your site. Always perform lots of testing as you will need to teak it to your liking’s.
