Site Speed Suggestions from an SEO Content Writer

Site speed is vital to your site’s page rank, user experience (UX), and getting people to your site. Just ask an SEO content writer or website optimizer.

Make sure your SEO content writer knows that the amount of time it takes to load your site, or transfer from one page to the next easily and swiftly otherwise known as site speed is critical to user satisfaction and SEO page rank.

We’ve all sat and pondered the question of, “why is it that my website sits there spinning, while others seem to take off faster than an Olympic track runner? Everybody else’s sites seem to pop right up on command like a magical Jack-in-the-Box. But my site? Not so much. In fact, it is still spinning. Smiling at my frustration like a wacko Chucky doll. Website Optimization plays an important role when search engine indexer like Bing, Google, and others use search engine algorithms to index a site. We all understand there is no way of absolutely knowing for certain because they do not announce their system to the public because it would eventually cause the abuse of the system creating a “biased” playing field. Because of secret algorithms, they allow search engines to index sites without public knowledge of parameters used.

SEO Site Speed Factors

The speed of your site is one huge factor used to determine your website rank on Bing, Google, and other search engines. This was not always such a big deal in marketing a website. Page Ranking was mainly focused on keywords stuffing but that is changing. You may be intrigued and surprised to find out that the most important and critical components actually may not have anything to do with rankings.

In all actuality, most internet users will only wait a few seconds at most for a site to pop up before they decide to move forward and click on the next search engine results. In fact, according to Kissmetrics, “40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.”  This should be the most critical consideration to reducing loading times for a site. Users do not stay on a sluggish site very long either. But, the most significant reason you should speed up your site is since the users’ experience (UX) is not good, they do not stay long enough to make a purchase or finish registering. So even when you just use your site as a blogging platform, your main goal should be to produce the best site you can for an amazing UX.

How to Determine Site Speed

The first thing you will want to determine is what is slowing down your site. This is very important because without this information you will not know what to fix. The tricky thing is that they will all give you a different reading, so make sure to use as many tools as possible. This will give you a more accurate reading and determine what needs to be fixed for optimum UX. As an SEO content writer, I have four resources that I use regularly to ensure my writing will not slow down your website and my website speed is what I expect it to be:

PageSpeed Insight from Google

Pingdom

WebPage Test

Yslow

Use an SEO Content Writer

Having an SEO Content Writer for SEO is not always a necessity, but when you get busy and do not have the time to put up a new post weekly or bi-monthly, you may want to consider hiring one. If you need something written right away, use my simple contact form and I’ll get back to you right away.

Those Things You Need to Fix on Your Site

This is another area that a website optimization professional would excel in but you could learn some of these techniques yourself if you want to spend the time, try Udemy and look for the Web Developers Bootcamp. Most items that slow up your website loading time are not easy to fix yourself without taking an IT course or two and Udemy makes it easy and cheap. You would be amazed at how much information is available to you. For website optimization, an SEO content writer would know which keyword phrases to use to help your page rank, they would know to optimize images, and they would be knowledgeable of what images to use. You also want to make sure you optimize databases and tables. A critical part of fixing your site speed would be to address all DNS issues.

If you have query strings from static resources that are slowing down your site, this is a simple fix. Just add the Remove Query Strings From Static Resources plugin and it will remove query strings from CSS and JS files from the HTML head but will not remove query strings from inside your HTML body. This will improve your loading speed immensely and simply. 

Since the speed of your site is so vital to the livelihood and productivity of your precious website, you may want to address some of those issues that were just mentioned as soon as possible. There are all kinds of information available to you regarding optimizing images, optimizing database and tables, DNS issues and even dynamic sites with caching. Some of these remedies include using an image minimizer to make jpegs smaller without compromising quality. Today’s high definition images take up a lot of space and those take a long time to retrieve from your server. It is very important to prioritize optimizing these images.

I really like using Tiny PNG because this is so simple and user-friendly for the images you already have uploaded. Another quick fix to image optimization is the WP Smush plugin that condenses all the images on your entire site. As you can imagine, this is extremely convenient.

When you update your site frequently, your WordPress database or another Content Management System (CMS) that you use grows bigger and bigger over time. Those large databases affect your site’s load speed. Other performance measures may also be affected on your site. When it takes longer for the website’s server to return information for your database and SQL tables, your site speed suffers. That is the reason it is so important to optimize these databases frequently.

Next are tables and databases. Do NOT avoid this process thinking you don’t have tables or databases. WordPress uses around 11 core tables or databases and this will likely expand soon, not to mention the tables and databases used by some plugins

Use WP-Optimize, for all WordPress sites and phpMyAdmin or Adminer, are other free SQL database (Db) tools.

Install a cache plugin, which will significantly speed up your access time and page transfers inside your site. If your host does not administer caching on your site, WP Super Cache will cache your websites without all the bells and whistles. However, some say that WP Rocket is a much better product, yet it does cost you $39 annually. It might be worth the added security and fewer hassles, particularly, if you aren’t very savvy with website optimization stuff.

Some will recommend W3 Total Cache, but once again it is not intended for those of us who are not savvy with IT. If you have a developer, you could ask them if it is good for your site speed.

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