Well, you must be aware of the fact that Google ranks the pages that load slowly in the least in comparison with pages that load fast. Also, the slow loading pages have higher bounce rates. If you want your website ranking to considerably improvise and speed up your SEO, then you must follow certain guidelines in order to increase your website ranking.
The following are some important guidelines for improvising the SEO and speeding up your WordPress site.
1. Examine and Evaluate your performance
In order to understand and get a clear picture of where your WordPress site stands, you will have to evaluate your web site’s performance. This can be done with the help of Online Website performance tests such as Google’s Page Speed Insight or Pingdom. These tools can help in determining your page’s loading speed, ranking, and so on. The results displayed in these tools can help in understanding the root causes of problems faced in your site.
2. Select an efficient host
When you are starting your website, a shared host may seem like the most reliable option but do not forget that it comes with its fair share of pros and cons. One of the greatest drawback involved in sharing the host is that the super slow speed of the site. It also results in downtime on a frequent basis due to the traffic of other sites.
3. Image optimization
Did you know that Yahoo! has an auto image optimizer that reduces the file size of the images to the optimum, also ensuring no defects in quality. But optimizing the images for every single time can become a painful chore. But luckily, there is a plugin absolutely free of cost called as WP- SmushIt that can actually reduce the image size automatically as and when you upload them.
4. Homepage optimization
You need to optimize your home page so that it loads quickly. Making your website load faster is the basic and the most essential part of your site. It actually determines how efficient the working of your website is. The best way to optimize your home page of the website is to keep the content as minimum as possible. Go for small excerpts instead of displaying the full content. Also, minimize the number of posts to be displayed on the page. Get rid of plug-ins and widgets that are no longer in use. A clean and organized home page looks not just great but also loads faster.
5. Make use of Well coded WordPress theme
You need to start using a fast, efficient and well-coded WordPress framework. Go for a theme with minimum plugins and additional trivia. Adding loads of unwanted plugins and widgets can slow down the performance of your website. So be sure to choose a well-coded WordPress theme or framework that will be beneficial to your site and should not affect the website negatively.
6. Use the Zip format
A compressed format that comes in Zip should be made available to the viewers of your site. The zip format is small in size, thereby it possesses the ability to load quicker and ensures less delays.
7. Routine maintenance is necessary
Perform routine maintenance on your plugins in order to help them run efficiently. Plug in maintenance is an essential part of WordPress sites. If the plugins are not updated on a regular basis, your site is also prone to get hacked. Therefore, the routine maintenance of WordPress sites and the plugins are extremely important.
8. Database optimization and spam deletion
You can optimize your WordPress site with the help of online tools like WP-Optimize and WP-DB Manager. These plugin devices have the potential to delete the spam on your site, deleted posts, drafts and other miscellaneous junk that has been stored in your website contributing towards making it slower. You have to get rid of spam and for that, you will need to reduce the impact of negative spam in your website that is making it function slowly and poorly. Speed up your word press by deleting all the spam posts that are lurking in your website.