5 Tips to Speed Up your Website for Better Search Engine Ranking

Website speed is important when it comes to ranking on Google. Here’s an official announcement in Google webmaster central blog some years back:

You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests…

Matt Cutts has mentioned in his blog about the importance of website speed. He also stated that it is better to focus on some very easy, straightforward, small steps that can improve your website’s user experience. Speeding up your website is one of them.

There are case studies where the site owner ranks well in search engine after they have optimized their website.

In a case study, SmartFurniture CEO confirmed that the site made a quantum lead in search engine ranking simply by increasing his site performance. Work Coach Cage, in another case study, had gained an extra 40% organic traffics after cleaning up its codes and broken links.

Here are 5 very easy and straightforward ways you can do to improve your site performance:

1. Optimize and reduce your image size

A website with un-optimized images takes longer time to load. Images with larger size will take up a lot of your server resources and are heavy while transferring. If the images on your website are over 1mb, there’s something you need to do.

You can make use of tools in the market to reduce your image size. ImageRecycle is a useful tool that able to optimize your image and PDF file. It works well with many popular CMS like WordPress, Joomla and Shopify. You can optimize the size of your image while maintaining the quality. Your website will become lighter and load faster. It will obviously improve your website loading speed.

2. Consider a better host

If you are serious about optimizing your site faster, invest in a decent hosting.

If your website is hosting at Uncle David’s house of Hosting for free, don’t expect to break speed records. I’m not saying Uncle David’s hosting is bad. Unless you are a serious geek, you will want to spend money on better host. Consider choosing a better hosting; it saves you a lot of time and hassle.

Above is the real life experience when WebHostingSecretRevealed switched to a premium hosting from a cheap hosting. The average page load speed cut down from over 900ms to 500ms. Sometimes, you can’t rely on cheap stuffs for excellent outcome.

3. Optimize your database

When you host your website using WordPress or any CMS that rely heavily on database usage; you are advice to optimize your database. This is a powerful way to boost your website speed.

When your database grew larger, it takes longer to render pages for those visiting you. You might have unused records, redundant tables or entries in your database. These are the things you can remove from your database without affecting your site.

If you are on a self-hosted WordPress, you can make use of plugins to do the hard work. By optimizing your database, it can significantly reduce your site’s loading time. Thus, improve your website performance. Check the WP Speed of Light for WordPress, it's free and doing database optimization.

4. Get a CDN

What is CND? A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver webpages/content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user.

For example, if your site is hosted on server in US, it will generally be faster for people in US. Your website will be slower for people from other parts of the world. A CDN will solve this problem by storing your static files across servers worldwide. It will serve your web page from different servers based on user’s location. If someone from Singapore is trying to visit you, it will get served from a server in Asia instead of a server in Europe.

You can take a look on some reputable CDN services such as MaxCDN, CloudFlare and Amazon CloudFront.

5. Keep your code in place

One easy way to improve your page load time in the view of visitors is to tidy up your code. You can place your CSS at the top and Javascript at the bottom.

The reason of putting your stylesheets on the top of the page is to prohibit progressive rendering. It will save the resources that browsers may need to load and redraw elements of your pages. And, adding Javascript to the bottom will prevent page from full code loading before displaying.

Although this barely helps in term of SEO, doing so will improve your user experience. Your visitors will feel that the page is loading in a faster manner.

Although these are only a few tips you can use to speed up your site, they are the easiest to start with. Now, let me emphasize, please make a backup before making any changes of your website.

Editor note: This article was written in coloboration with our blog partner www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net