Optimising and speeding up your website for a good positioning

Introduction

This is a very important issue to take into account once a website is finished. Optimising and speeding up your website so that it loads faster will have a big influence on your website's ranking. It must be taken into account that it is not the only thing that must be done to obtain a web positioning, but it is a big part of it. Although the concepts of optimising and accelerating your website go hand in hand and vice versa, we are going to separate them in order to inform you in more detail. We are going to explain it in a way that you can understand and trying not to use too many technical words.

Optimise your website

Optimising your website is the part that refers to all the technical procedures that need to be performed on your website in order to have a good position in Google's results.

And what work is carried out within this concept?

Well, we are going to explain just a few of them, otherwise this article would take forever, but even so, the information we are going to give you is enough to have a good optimisation.

First, and not in this order, you have to verify that your website has the keywords you are interested in. That is to say, that you have worked with the friendly URLs, the texts of your website in line with the keywords for which you want to be found on the Internet.

On the other hand, make good use of the tags in each section of your website (H1, H2, etc..).

And above all, don't forget to install an SSL certificate, nowadays it is rare that a hosting company doesn't provide one. For example, the Let's Encrypt certificate is free.

Another very important thing, and believe it or not, there are still many websites that do not comply with this very important part: your website has to be responsive. This means that it must adapt to any type of monitor or screen, whether it's a mobile or tablet, laptop or desktop computer.

On the other hand, you have to have a good architecture on your website. This means that the information displayed should be clear, and well interconnected. To give you an idea, it is desirable that we can reach any page of your website in less than 3 clicks.

And finally, you need to check that you don't have broken links (links within your page that lead to a non-existent site). You can check this manually by browsing your website, or you can use some free tools such as https://www.drlinkcheck.com ó https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/website-dead-link-checker.asp and thus speed up the verification process.

Accelerate your website

It is important to accelerate the speed of your website because we get more chances to be better positioned in Google. On the other hand, it will also affect the user's experience and usability. Remember, the brain likes speed, more than 3 seconds waiting for a website to load means that the user will go to another one, so you lose potential customers.

Well, here we are going to explain in brief what work is involved in accelerating your website for a good positioning.

How do I know the current speed of my website?

There are various online options that allow you to analyse and verify the loading speed of your website, for example the tool GTMetrix y Google Speed Insights are the most famous ones, and they are really the ones we use in Aulatina to optimize the speed of our websites. Anyway, in its day, we already published an article of 7 online tools to measure the speed of your website, you can visit it by clicking here: 7 tools to measure the speed of your website.

We are going to explain the most commonly used technical procedures that really help you to achieve a good loading speed score.

Server speed

Your website has to be hosted on a server that has a fast response time. There is little you can do about this, as it is not up to you, it is only up to you to choose a good server. In case you didn't know about it, we have hostings that are optimised to have a good response time.

Optimise the images on your website

It is important that the images you have on your website have an optimal weight, that is to say, that they are not heavy images that take a long time to load. If your website is built with WordPress, there are free plugins for this, for example the WP Smush o Tiny PNG or JPG Mini. If not, you should have a good image editor programme to save them well optimised.

Improve your website cache

A good cache of all the elements that make up your website considerably improve the loading speed. There are servers that already provide you with this option included in the installation of your wordpress (Varnish cache). You can still install a caching plugin (in the case of WordPress) such as: WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache o WP Super Cache among others.

Minification of your website code

This option is one of the more technical and more or less complex options, as it requires good programming skills. Minification refers to removing code that is not used on your website, using shorter function names, i.e. removing code from your website that is not needed or optimising it, reducing spaces, file unification, etc. In this case, Google checks the minification of HTML, CSS and Javascript resources. There are several plugins for wordpress that perform these processes, such as: WP Super Minify o Autoptimize.

This section helps a lot to optimise and speed up your website.

Optimisation of the database

When we have a wordpress websiteThe database that it has to function, normally fills up with "rubbish" over time. In this case, what you have to do is to remove and clean the database of unnecessary fields that were needed at the time but are no longer needed. To do this you can use the plugin Cache Enabler o WP Optmize.

Software updates

And last but not least, to optimise and speed up your website, keep your server constantly updated with the latest software versions (PHP, etc.). And if you have wordpress, keep it too updated to the latest version.

Well, here we have left an outline of the procedures to optimise and accelerate your website for a good positioning. As we said before, it is a brief summary. But it is enough to be able to see results in your web page in what would be a before to optimise and an after of optiimzar.

However, if you need help to optimise and speed up your website, please contact us. And we will do a free audit of your website to see what state it is in and what improvements it needs.