2015 Website SEO Guide for Businesses (2015)
Website Speed
Let’s start off with website speed and then we’ll go into a little more detail about what you can do to make your website faster.
Think about it, if you visit a website and it takes 5 seconds to load, what do you do? You get sick of waiting and look for another website that will load up a lot quicker.
Your potential customers will do the exact same thing. Nobody likes waiting in line, especially not for websites.
Google also thinks that your website speed is important and that’s why they website speed is a part of their search engine algorithm.
Site speed improves the user experience, and anything that improves user experience is a good thing. The speed of your website should not ne ignored, especially in 2015, where a lot of your traffic will be coming from mobile users.
Research shows that about 47% of web users expect a website to load in under 2 seconds. That was in 2009. In 2012 the percentage of mobile users that expect a page to load in less than 2 seconds stood at 70%.
If you really care about your website visitors, you will make sure that your website has the fastest load time possible.
It’s just good for business. Your bounce rate will decrease and you will sell more of your products and services. Your website will also move up higher in search engine rankings.
A 1 second delay can reduce your online sales by around 7%.
Slow pages will kill off your conversion rate.
Your web developer should already know the importance of website speed and if you are planning on getting a new website developed, then this is one of the first things you should be talking about.
If you already have a website, then speak to your developer if it isn’t fast enough. Next we’ll find out what you can do by yourself to increase the speed or at least troubleshoot some performance issues.
Firstly, let’s test the speed of your website.
Open up your favourite web browser and go to tools.pingdom.com
Type in your website address and click “Test Now”
Your “Performance Grade” should be higher than 80 and your “Load Time” should be under 2 seconds.
If your performance grade is higher than 80 and your load time is higher than 2 seconds, then your website is already doing pretty good, but even still, it can always perform faster.
On my own website, www.jamesmcarson.com before doing any optimisation on it, I am getting a Performance Grade of 81 and a load time of 2.66 seconds on tools.pingdom.com
That’s not bad, but it could be a heck of a lot better. My website runs on WordPress, so here are a few things you can do to make your WordPress site faster.
WordPress Plugins
Some WordPress Plugins can cause your website to run slow, so make sure and remove any unnecessary Plugins before doing anything else. Make sure you really need all the Plugins that you currently have installed by deactivating them and then deleting them.
If your website is built on WordPress, then there is a plugin that you can download called W3 Total Cache.
Now I’m going to tell you how to install and configure the W3 Total Cache Plugin.
Go to your WordPress Dashboard and on the admin bar on the left hand side navigate to “Plugins” and click on “Add New”
Type in ‘W3 Total Cache’ in the search box on the right hand side
Click “Install Now” and click “OK”
Now click “Activate Plugin”
On the Admin Bar, you’ll see a new option called “Performance”
Navigate to “Performance” and click on “General Settings”
Scroll down to “Page Cache” and click on the “Enable” check box
Now scroll down to “Minify” and click the “Enable” check box
Scroll down to “Database Cache” and click the “Enable” check box
Scroll down o “Object Cache” and click the “Enable” check box
Now click on the “Save all settings” button
That’s the General Settings sorted out, now lets go a little bit more in depth.
On the admin bar, click on “Page Cache”
Scroll down to “Cache Preload” and check the “Automatically prime the page cache” check box
Also in this part, click on the “Preload the post cache upon publish events” check box
On the “Purge Policy: Page Cache” section, select the “Front page” check box if you have a blog on your home page like I do at www.jamesmcarson.com
If you just have a static home page, leave it unchecked
Now click on “Save All Settings”
On the Admin Bar, click on “Minify”
Under “HTML & XML”, check all the boxes
Click on the “Save all settings” button
On the Admin Bar, click on “Browser Cache”
Enable the “Set expires header”
Enable the “Set cache control header”
Enable the “Set entity tag(etag)”
Enable “Set W3 Total Cache header”
Now click on the “Save all settings” button
Let’s go back to tools.pingdom.com and test your website speed again.
The “Performance Grade” is now 87
The “Load Time” is now 1.40 seconds
That’s an incredible 1.26 seconds shaved off the load time and a performance increase from 81% to 87%. That’s a pretty good increase in speed for about 10 minutes work.
Google PageSpeed Service
Google offers its own optimisation service called Google PageSpeed. It is quick and easy to setup and it keep you ahead of the latest optimisation techniques. As Google themselves say, Happier Users = More Conversions.
Google PageSpeed is currently in a limited trial, if you go to the website and you can’t yet join then keep checking back. New users are allowed to join every few weeks or so.
At some stage in the future Google may decide to charge for this service, but right now it is free, it has been free for years and should be free for quite a long time yet.
The Google PageSpeed Service also works well with the W3 Total Cache Plugin, but if you don’t use WordPress, never fear. Google PageSpeed works with any website.
First of all, we’re going to sign up to the Google PageSpeed Service.
Go to the following website https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service
On the bottom right, click on “Manage my Account”
In the middle of the page, click on “Add New Domain”
Enter your domain name, example www.jamesmcarson.com
Click the “Add” button
Now click the “Claim Ownership” button
If you’ve already got your website setup with Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools, it will be automatically verified. This is to stop people from claiming your domain for themselves.
Now we have to add a CNAME Record Type to configure the Serving Domain.
Follow the instructions provided on the Google PageSpeed Service page to configure your domain for your hosting provider.
Basically you want to remove the A record in the DNS settings and replace it with a CNAME record pointing to pagespeed.googlehosted.com
It can take up to 24 hours for these changes to work.
After 24 hours, the “Performance Grade” at tools.pingdom.com for www.jamesmcarson.com is now 88% and the load time is 917ms, well under 1 second.
That’s a massive increase in speed and it’s something that would cost you hundred of pounds or dollars if you were paying someone to do it for you.
According to Google your website will be between 25% and 60% faster than what it was before you set it up on Google PageSpeed Service.
In the previous PageSpeed update, Google starting to prioritise content that appears above the fold of websites. On all of my customers websites, especially the websites that run on WordPress, I have noticed quite a difference in speed.
Now that the speed part of SEO is sorted out and your website is running as fast as possible, let’s move on and find out what else you can do to secure your website.