In Google’s latest update, page speed is now a ranking factor on mobile search. If you haven’t made the adjustment yet, page speed should now be one of the most important factors of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.
Google states over half of the visits made to mobile sites are abandoned if it takes more than 3 seconds for the screen to load.
The bottom line is simple: Page speed plays a significant role in performance, whether we’re talking about paid or organic search, reader engagement, sales or lead generation.
Fortunately, improving page speed isn’t some arcane and mysterious dark art. You won’t need to brew a special potion, summon demons, or sell your soul.
Here are two simple tips that you can use today to improve your page speed!
Easy on the Plug-Ins
Plug-ins are some of the things that make WordPress awesome. They’re also some of the things that can make it terrible because they could be poorly programmed, resulting in poor performance. They also often load several CSS, JavaScript and image files, even those already loaded, such as JQuery.
This can get really messy really quick.
Each plug-in, no matter how lightweight, will place a load on your server when it serves a web page. Add up a few and the difference is noticeable, and that’s before we even talk about the CSS, JavaScript and image files it may need to load.
Long story short, a few plug-ins are all good. Though, if you’re getting into the double digits invest some time intolearn PHP and JavaScript or hiring a real developer who can build the functionality you need without a lot of bloated extras that will slow down a website.
Ditch Discount Web Hosting
We all want to save money, but your web hosting is not where you want to cut corners. It’s not a commodity. There’s a tremendous difference between that $10 a month hosting package from a bottom-end web host and a $30 a month hosting package from a higher-end web host like WP Engine.
Cheap web hosting is cheap for a reason.
Bargain hosting packages are not built for performance, they simply cram as many websites as they can onto each server and don’t optimize for speed. As a result, your website will load painfully slowly.
A common conversation about this topic usually results in a response of “Well, it loads quickly for me”. In reality, it doesn’t.
For example, if your site is WordPress based and you go from using bargain web hosting, where you’re trying to optimize speeds using plug-ins, to a specialized WordPress hosting company, you’ll likely see a 40% increase in speed before caching and other fine tunings.
Invest in robust, high-quality web hosting and put in the same fine-tuning for speed that you ordinarily would. You’ll achieve a dramatic improvement over most, if not all of your competitors.
If you’re looking to see how else you can improve your page speeds, check out the full article over at Search Engine Land.
______________________________________________________________
Thanks for reading!
Enjoyed this article? Sign up for The Summit - our monthly Newsletter.
Say Hello On: Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube