These days, website visitors have high expectations when it comes to website speed. In fact, according to study by Google, over half of website visitors will abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. This makes site speed a critical factor for not only user experience but also for search engine optimization (SEO).

If your site is built on WordPress, there are several steps you can take to optimize your website speed and improve your SEO ranking. Here are seven things that you can do to improve your website’s load speed and SEO.

1. Choose a reliable hosting provider:

Your web hosting provider can have a significant impact on your website’s speed. You really do get what you pay for, so beware of cheap hosting. It’s important to choose a reputable provider that offers fast and reliable servers. So pay attention to uptime guarantees and any bandwidth limits before selecting a hosting company.

2. Use a lightweight theme:

Your website’s theme has a big impact on its speed. Avoid heavy and complex themes that can slow down your site. Instead, opt for lightweight themes that are optimized for speed. Again, you get what you pay for so free themes are not always optimized for speed. Before selecting a theme, find a site that uses it and run a performance test on it. Analyze the results to see if there are any problems caused by the theme.

3. Optimize your images:

Large images and high-definition videos can significantly slow down your website. So use image optimization tools to compress and resize your images. Many tools are able to  reduce the file size of your images without compromising their quality.

4. Minimize HTTP requests:

Every time a user visits your website, their browser makes multiple requests to the server for different resources such as images, CSS files, and JavaScript. Minimizing these requests can significantly improve your website’s speed. There are plug-ins that can help with this. Your web host and/or your theme may come with this functionality built-in.

5. Use a caching plugin:

Caching plugins can help speed up your website by storing frequently accessed data on the user’s device or browser, reducing the number of requests made to the server. As WordPress dynamically creates your site when users access it, caching plug-ins can create static copies (that are only updated when their content changes) to make the site load quicker.

6. Minimize the use of plugins:

While plugins can add functionality to your website, they can also slow it down. Plug-ins add code to your website and many add code to every page. This increases the page size and thus impacts load time. So be mindful of the plugins you use and remove ones that you don’t need.

7. Optimize your code:

If you don’t have a coding background, you might want to bring someone in to help you with this as making changes to code can break your site.

With that being said, optimizing your code can help reduce the size of your website’s files, making them load faster. This can be done by minifying your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. Again, even using a plug-in to do this can break your site, so if your site needs high availability, you should test this out on a staging server.

Putting it all together:

So, if you’re looking to improve your website’s SEO ranking and provide a better user experience for your visitors, optimizing your site speed is a critical step. By implementing the strategies outlined above, you can significantly improve your website’s speed, resulting in higher search engine rankings, increased traffic, and ultimately, more conversions.

Again, some of these items should only be done by experts. We offer a 30-minute free consultation where we can review your site and help you make changes. We can also recommend hosting providers, lightweight themes, and plug-ins that will help speed up your site.