4 Tips On How To Speed Up Your Website

Today’s top SEO tip showing how to speed up your website isn’t sexy (in fact, it’s a bit boring to be honest), but it really works and Google loves it!

We all know creating a 5,000-word blog post is impressive. A backlink from the BBC is amazing. But you know what’s NOT going to get anyone’s praise and admiration? Making your website load faster.

And that’s a real shame because improving the speed your web pages load is one of the easiest ways to increase your rankings in Google (Page load speed is a ranking factor in Google search algorithm).

Amazon discovered that just a one-second increase in load time decreased their revenue by a corresponding 1%. And that really adds up over time!

The good news is, it’s way easier to improve your load times than it is to write a 5,000-word blog post or get a link from the BBC 🙂

Below are 4 top SEO tips you can start implementing immediately to make your website load faster, but before you do that, pop over to gtmetrix.com to run a free speed test for your website to see how fast your home page is loading.

If you get a B or below, or your ‘Largest Contentful Paint’ is over 1.2s, you need to make some changes to speed things up (Google likes a website to load in less than 1.2s and will put websites that load faster higher in their search results).

[1] The first and easiest thing to do is to include the trailing slash at the end of the URL. By doing this, you’re telling the server there are no file directories to search and this page is the final destination. So, instead of https://plymouthseo.uk/testimonials your URL should be https://plymouthseo.uk/testimonials/

[2] Compress and optimise Images: As a general rule, you never want your images to be more than 1MB in size (The smaller the better, whilst maintaining image quality).

[3] Use caching. When a site caches, the server saves copies of its pages, so it doesn’t have to start from scratch every time it loads the site. This is super easy to do if you have a WordPress website as you can install a plugin to do the job for you. We use and recommend WP Rocket.

[4] Use a free CDN (Content Delivery Network) like Cloudflare. A CDN uses a server closest to the person visiting your website, which means it loads faster.

There are other more advanced technical things you can do to turbo-charge your website, but if you do these 4 easy things first, your web page load times will speed up and your search rankings will move up (If your website is sending all the other signals that Google is looking for of course!).

If you need any help speeding up your website, want more leads and customers from your website or would like a free SEO audit of your website to check if it’s sending all the right signals to Google, CONTACT US now to see how we can help you out 🙂

I hope you found this How To Speed Up Your Website blog post helpful. 

If you liked this free SEO tip, you should also check out our next post: How to increase your website traffic by 200% and our last post: How To Get Backlinks For Free!