Your website speed contribute a great deal in SEO rankings Why ?

Well, as we know, SEO ranking of a website depends upon a number of factors. Speed of your website is one among the major factor in making the website ranked well in search results. A digital marketer must know that major search engines like Google and bing continuously check with their robots and crawl those sites which are optimized their website speed settings.

Now, let’s discuss about some elements which affect the speed of a website which a site owner must understand. There are factors like size of your webpage, server settings , cache management, usage of JavaScripts and stylesheets etc. Optimization of these elements makes your website perform well in terms of user experience and search results.

The following points makes you understand how you can identify the current performance of your website and how you can make optimizations in order to make them better.

Find out current performance.

Here we go! The solution for a problem always begins with finding out what the real problem is. There are a lot of tools which help you identify the current performance of your website in a single click. There are sites like Gtmetrix, pingdom and google speed insights which are best in terms of giving your site information. I would personally recomment Gtmetrix in order to fine tune your website well. You can identify the perofmance by simply giving the url of your site in Gtmetrix and it will provide you with the report after analyzing the site. Gtmetrix consider some key performance indicators and provides you with page load time, total size of the page and total number of server requests. It also gives you average score index which matches with your current score and advises what are the possible actions you can take.

Analyse the report

Once you get the report from Gtmetrix, you’ll be able to understand what are elements which affects you badly in terms of your page loading speed and performance. You can navigate the report provided by Gtmetrix and check the Page Speed tab and Yslow tab to check how your site is being scored by Gtmetrix for the key elements. Page speed and Y Slow score has a maximum of A100 respectively. Analyse each elements well and check with your developer to make your scores to atleast between A90-95 % . When you analyse the waterflow tab, it shows your page loading assets and their loading time and size of each assets. Findout which assets you do not require for your website or need to be optimized.

Remove unused assets from your site

Here comes the first part of your optimization process. Once you get the report from Gtmetrix, you have a list of assets which need to be removed from your home page or site wide. If you are using WordPress, then there are some plugins you can use in order to remove the page assets. In case of HTML pages, the removal process to be done manually. If you are not a developer or a coder, you can remove the assets manually through trial and error method. But, keep in mind before doing every activity you must take backup of your website in case if anything went wrong.

Reduce Size of your images

The size of your images contribute a high part in your loading time as it increases the total size of your webpage. From your report, find out which images are having big in terms of size and reduce their sizes. For wordpress, use image flushing tools and for normal websites, use any of the websites which helps you reducing the size of your images without loosing their quality. Remember that when you uploading a new image, always follow the right proportion and minimize the size before upload.

Combine Javascripts and Minfiy CSS

This is another important factor where you should optimize carefully. If your website has more javascripts, it will increase the request made from your browser to server also, same in case of CSS. Hence, you must combine the Javascripts into fewer and minify CSS in order to tweak your website. For WordPress there are tools or plugins to help you do so, but for normal sites, you have to do with the help of a developer. You can also do javascript optimization by following “Async” or “Defer” method which gives you better score in “defer parsing javascript” index in reports.

Reduce Stylesheets.

Stylesheets are areas where the rules of your styles are saved. If your website has more style sheets, it will increase the number of requests made to server and therefore increases the loading time and reduces the speed. To optimize well, you have to reduce the  unwanted stylesheets or minimize the stylesheet into a single one. Once you have done, check with Gtmetrix again and you will see that the server requests are reduced considerably.

Optmize Server Settings

By optimizing the server settings, you can increase the speed of your website. If Gtmetrix shows “Server is slow” , then contact your hosting provider and do the optimization from their end by upgrading the server or tweak database or you can move the server to a location which is close to your region. You can also do some server optimization by editing the htaccess file in your server and add scripts to leverage your browser cache.Hope you have enjoyed your reading about website page speed and how it is affecting your SEO rankings. If you are looking for an agency to optimize your website speed or WordPress Speed  or want to build a custom WordPress website,  you can contact us at Calpar Global. If you want to learn more about author of this article, follow LinkedIn Profile