5 Essential Steps to Improve your WordPress Speed & Boost Your SEO
In this article you will learn some simple steps you can take to improve your WordPress speed and boost your SEO efforts. Google is the most famous marketing channel for almost all businesses. And WordPress (WP) – which is used by about 75 million websites – can be installed, deployed, and updated for free. WP was written in PHP and is the most popular open-source content management system.
Another advantage of WP is that you do not have to be an SEO expert or spend a lot of time learning how to improve your WordPress speed. You do not need to know how to code or follow complicated procedures to achieve such a goal.
Now, you are going to learn five quick WordPress SEO tips that you can use to improve your rankings in just a few weeks. Sound exciting? Let’s get started.
#1 Improve Your WordPress Speed & Track the Improvement
The loading speed of your website is vital for many reasons. If one of your web pages takes longer than 3 seconds to load, visitors will leave the page. From Google’s point of view, speed is essential too. It is a common misconception that Google rewards faster websites; in reality, slow websites are penalized. The higher the speed of a website, the lower the risk of being penalized, and the better your ranking will be.
You can use several tools to check your site’s speed; Pingdom is one example. However, we recommend using Google Analytics. Set it up today if you don’t already have it. And you can quickly improve your WordPress site speed by:
- Installing one of the popular caching plugins.
- Compressing all the large image files on your site and re-uploading them.
- Choosing a better hosting provider.
However, #2 might be time-consuming if you have a lot of images. But if you want to improve your WordPress speed, this is one of the best and easiest ways.
#2 Make Your WordPress Site Mobile-Friendly
Everyone already knows it: mobile devices have won the competition when it comes to the number of users surfing online (vs. their desktop cousins). And this trend will continue as phones become more innovative and developers work tirelessly to improve voice search engines.
Google, of course, knows this better than we do and rewards mobile-friendly website design with better rankings. The world’s largest search engine is primarily concerned with providing the best experience for end-users. And that includes efficiently visiting a mobile-friendly website on a mobile device.
But How Can You Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly?
The easiest way to do this is to choose a mobile-friendly WordPress theme – you might want to read 10 WP Design Ideas in 2022 for this, but if you are not planning on switching themes, we can help.
Without a mobile-friendly website, your WP website may perform poorly on search engine results pages (SERPs), which means you could lose customers – or even your visibility – due to poor usability.
However, adding mobile features to your WordPress website may seem like an insurmountable obstacle if you are not a web developer. But that’s not true, and there are tools for that.
Some useful WordPress plugins that will make your WP websites more appealing to mobile users include:
- WPtouch Mobile Plugin
- Jetpack
- WordPress Mobile Pack
- AMP for WP– Accelerated Mobile Pages
- Touchy– A WordPress Mobile Menu Plugin
#3 Delete & Redirect Thin Content
Thin content is any post on your website that is of no use. It is usually less than 300 words and offers no clear benefit to the reader. Think of your website as a farm and SEO as the water you need for it. Wasting that water on weeds is the last thing you want.
If you have a lot of useless content, you are basically watering dead plants. You need to uproot them and use the water for the already thriving plants.
Where Do We Often Find Thin Content?
Thin content is usually found on more popular websites. E-commerce stores often have a hard time creating original, high-quality content for all pages, especially thousands of product pages.
Distinguish Between Copying & Reworking
Copying content from other sources usually has adverse effects. Again, this usually happens with e-commerce websites, where editors pull descriptions directly from the manufacturer’s official website.
Pages are often duplicated to save time and change only a few words. Reworking one or more sources is different from copying.
#4 All Images Should Have Alt Text
Alt-text is an HTML image attribute that allows you to create an alternate text version of your image. Alt-text is beneficial if you can’t load the image or if there are accessibility issues.
Google image search accounts for about 10% of all Google search traffic – and that’s significant! Adding alt text to images is an easy way to benefit from some traffic.
But how do you find all the images on your site that do not have alt text? One solution is to use Screaming Frog tools. While the free version doesn’t show you all of them, it will show you most or at least some of them.
Google uses alt text to determine a page’s topic, so it can even help you with searches that do not include images. As mentioned earlier, Alt text is essential to Google image search and can be considered a ranking factor.
Google uses alt text and computer vision algorithms to understand the subject of your images. Also, alt text in images is helpful as anchor text when you want to use an image as a link, either internally or externally.
#5 Review Your Site Structure & Internal Linking
Your website’s navigation is critical from an SEO perspective. How? Let’s get back to our farming analogy! Incorporating internal links is like connecting different parts of a farm with waterways. Using more internal links, you irrigate your farm more thoroughly and consistently.
However, make sure your navigation is clean. If you’re unsure which pages are the most important ones, check your analytics to determine the pages with the most favorable metrics. Alternatively, you can do a gut check. You should know which pages take the most time and require more work, right?
If you want to improve a page to rank better and faster, just add more internal links pointing to it! For example, if you have just written a new blog article that you have spent hours creating and proofreading, go to your previous posts and add links to the new one.
Get in Touch
If you have any questions about what we just said, please don’t hesitate to ask. Contact us today, and we will help you improve your website speed and boost your rankings with our customized SEO Services.
