Recently, Google admitted that as an organization they are obsessed with all things speed. They felt it was long overdue to include page loading speed into their SEO ranking algorithms. Why? Quick loading pages provide a much better and user-friendly experience while slow pages that churn and make you feel like you are back in dial up days just slows the internet down and are unsightly. As a business owner in Roatan, SEO is such an important factor to ensure your business is visible online.
While site speed will carry nowhere near the weight that content will for ranking, it will be an important new factor to prepare for in 2017 and beyond. There are a few simple ways to optimize your website to improve your site loading time:
Caching
A caching system or plugin for WordPress serves your website faster by loading a page previously saved to reduce loading times.
Reduce Image Sizes
Images that are 5000 x 5000 pixels are going to be slow to load. Reduce the size and save your page speed. The images will still look sharp – for example, the average recommended size for a small picture on WordPress is just 300 x 300 pixels.
Web Server
Not all hosting is the same. Research before and ensure that you are getting a quality web hosting service that will properly support the type of site you are running. Seems like a no-brainer, but if you are running a WordPress site and your web hosting package doesn’t have the proper technology to support it and the updates, it will slow down your page load time.
Better yet, make sure that your website developer is familiar with Google’s PageSpeed Tools. It’s an application designed for developers that will provide insights on how to optimize your site to increase speed and become more mobile friendly. With this tool, you can manually enter all the URL’s for your website and Google will instantly provide a custom analysis for your site. If any area fails their test, PageSpeed Tools provides clear details on how to correct – such as instructions for which images to optimize, a list of landing pages that have redirects which should be corrected or areas of content which have enabled blocking script resources. It is a very handy tool and even better, free!