[vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/S6RRVkpRN_I”][vc_column_text]Improving the speed and performance of your web site can directly impact your search rank. A fast poor quality page may still get lost on page four, but a fantastic page that is overly slow may never reach it’s potential on the first page.
Watch this tip for some ideas on how to speed up your site, and what to look for that might be holding you back![/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
Transcript:
This week’s SEO Tip: Keeping it quick. One of the forgotten angles to SEO is ensuring that your website performs well. And I don’t mean performs well in terms of client conversion, or ad conversion. I’m talking about, does the site perform on the server? Hosting matters. Where you set up your website has everything to do with how quickly that site can respond to a user request, whether that is someone typing in your URL, clicking a button a form, or submitting to mailing list, or adding to cart. If your website is not optimized for speed, you could be losing search rank. Google’s algorithm has hundreds of factors in play, but one of those big factors is the speed and performance of the website in terms of download speed. And how you host your site can have a huge impact on that. Do you have caching enabled? So does the browser have the ability to save and then reuse pieces? Are your images small? Are they compressed? And are they progressive jpeg? So is the system built to deliver the page to your client in the fastest possible way? Picking a web host based on that speed and performance can be tricky because most web hosts don’t tell you who is hosting on their servers. There are some tools available to help you identify that speed, though, and certainly some tools available to help you recognize where your limitations are . If you’re not in a position to go searching for a new web host, consider using a tool like webpagetest.org to identify anything possible that you can do to speed up your site, whether that’s the use of a CDN, a content delivery network, or whether you need to compress your jpegs. Are you delivering PNG files? They look great but they’re very large, so maybe you should be considering changing those. Webpagetest.org will help you identify those slow-moving files. It’ll also help you identify things like overly large CSS files or JavaScripts that are getting in the way of your site’s performance. In short, what you need to do with your website is get lean. Get rid of the unnecessary, heavy, bloated stuff. We all love sites that are flashy and blink and pulse. Every one of those things, though, has a cost, and when it comes to search and search rank, unless you’re already sitting on Page 1, those items can be keeping you or holding you back. Consider the content and the speed of delivery of that content first. Another big tip: Test the site on your mobile phone, because mobile speed may even be a larger factor (because we don’t have a list of, you know, “Here are the 10 things we’re checking for”)… Mobile speed may even be a bigger factor, even, than desktop speed. So try your site out on your phone. If you can count 3 or 4-one thousand before that page is visible and useable, you might need to do some optimization. Links to some of the tools are in the description down below. Thanks for watching. Hit that “Like” button if you found the tip useful. Hit the “Subscribe” button over there if you’d like to get more, and we’ll see you next time. I’m Greg, from mtek. Have a great week.
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