Website Speed Becoming More of an Issue in SEO
- March 21, 2017
- Bradley Taylor
by Brad Taylor
Now that internet speeds and device speeds are very good , Google has put more focus on making sure that your site loads quickly. They have an internet speed test that allows you to test your website (both full site and responsive versions).
Of course, all efforts should be made to get the rating as high as possible so as to please Google but also the visitors to your website. Really, as long as your are above the 50 percentile you are doing OK. 60% or better is good. Not every website can be higher than 60% for several reasons, the most obvious being a site that runs lots of plugins or add-ons. Websites with many large images on the homepage or main template will cause the site to slow down as well.
WordPress
Everyone know that Wordpress has taken the web building industry by storm. It is now estimated that over 25% of all websites online are built with the WordPress platform. A simple stripped down installation of WordPress can load pretty fast. But the more customizing you do, the slower it gets. Here are some ways to improve your performance and be suitable in the eyes of Google.
- Install caching plugins. We have found WP Super Cache to work best.
- Allow Gzip compression. There are plugins for this but truly the best way is (if you are using CPanel) is to go into the “SEO setting” and “enable gzip compression”. It’s easy and does really help.
- Make sure your images have been optimized and are not very large in size. There are some plugins that do this automatically but they can mess up your images and image paths.
If your site is running 60 or better you are fine. Website speed should always be something in the back of your head when editing your site or programming. Do an occasional test to test your site speed and try your best to stay above the 60 mark.
