Ever felt that some of your keywords don’t perform as well as before? And are you wondering why other companies outrank you in Google? Then it might be smart to do a quick competitive analysis. Because in most cases, it’s not necessarily your site that’s performing worse; it’s other sites doing better. Luckily, if you want to do a competitive analysis to optimize your SEO efforts, there’s actually a lot you can do yourself. Let us take you through the steps!
Step 1: Define your keywords
It’s very important to use the right keywords in a competitive analysis. If you insist on using your (possibly branded) company outing as one of the main keywords, you might not have any competition, but you also won’t get any decent, organic traffic to your website. An example: Let’s say you’re offering ‘holiday homes’. If you insist on using the keyword ‘vacation cottage’, you are selling yourself short. Match the words your customers use.
Use Google Trends to get insights into how your keywords are used
Doing proper keyword research will help. Not just for this competitive analysis, but for the entire SEO optimization of your website!
Step 2: Analyze these keywords
Once you have defined the keywords you’d like to check against your competitors, the next step is obvious: search for these keywords. See who your competitors are by writing down who ranks higher than you.
Be realistic
If you’re on page two in Google and want to do a competitive analysis with the number one, there is probably a lot to gain. But you should keep two things in mind. First, your rankings probably won’t immediately shoot to the first spot. They’ll most likely go up step by step. And second, the high-ranking web pages, depending on the keywords, might have a higher marketing budget than you to back their ranking strategies. In fact, this could be the reason why they rank so high in the first place!
But don’t give up. Our mission is ‘SEO for everyone‘ for a reason. If you put in the work, you’ll be able to climb to higher rankings step-by-step. Check the keywords, then make them long-tail or add local keywords (city name, region name) if needed. Do a thorough analysis. Google Trends will tell you what keywords have more traffic in the target markets for your business, and (free/paid) tools like Ahrefs.com and Searchmetrics.com will give you even more keyword insights. You can even use the Semrush integration in Yoast SEO to find relevant related keywords that might attract traffic.
Climbing up in rankings a (few) step(s) at a time
Sometimes, you can achieve a big improvement in your rankings. But if your website is ranking number six, it’s easier to climb to spot five or four before you target the top three. Again, that top three probably has the marketing budget to go all out, whereas your immediate ‘ranking neighbors’ are struggling like you. Beat them first; it’s easier. Having said that: if you have the opportunity to dethrone number one, two, or three, of course, go ahead and do so.
Step 3: Check technical differences
You’ll need to check a number of things to determine on which aspects your competition is ahead of you. That’s why the next step of your competitive analysis is to see if there are any technical differences.
Site speed
The faster the site, the happier the visitor, and the happier the search engine. That’s why it’s important to look at speed insights when doing a competitive analysis. Speed insights will tell you if there is a huge difference between you and your main competitors.
Again, there are multiple ways to check SLL/HTTPS in a competitive analysis. You can get a nice overview with Builtwith.com. This site gives you a ton of technical information, including an SSL certificate. You can obviously check your browser’s address bar for this as well, but Builtwith could give you more insights while going over all other details. Like what CMS your competitor uses (and if they upgraded their WordPress install and you didn’t?).
Mobile site
Mobile-first. Mobile parity. Mobile UX. It’s all about mobile these days. Which makes sense, as most of today’s website traffic is from mobile devices, a few exceptions aside.
A good mobile website is about getting your visitor to the right page as soon as possible. This has to do with speed, a clear and pleasant branded design, and deciding about top tasks on your website. Go check the websites of your competitors and see where they are clearly outperforming you. Be sure to check your Core Web Vitals as well, as Google is paying a lot of attention to these. To test this, you can use for instance:
Step 4: Find content opportunities
Although technical optimizations are crucial, the quick wins will probably be in the field of content. Look at what you’ve written about your company and products, then see what your competitors published on their sites.
What are your competitors’ main pages? What are they trying to sell, and how did they manage to rank above you? See how focused their menu is and what pages they link to from there. Check if your competitor tells a better story than you. Then improve your story. The main menu of your website should be targeted at your visitor; it doesn’t have to explain all the awesome things you came up with.
Category pages or product pages
If you have a shop, it might be interesting to do a competitive analysis of your competitor’s store structure. Are they trying to persuade customers on a product page or on category pages?
Our advice: optimize and try to rank for most of your category pages. After all, in a market where there are a gazillion products, ranking for each and every one of them is tough! So write appealing, high-quality content for your category pages, make them your cornerstone content, and try to rank a lot of ’em. Your competitive analysis will tell you which of these pages are optimized by your main competitors. Optimize yours accordingly and, obviously, better.
A sitemap can show you the site structure of your competitor, be it via an HTML sitemap or an XML sitemap. It can tell you, for instance, if they are targeting certain long-tail keywords via the slugs of their pages. Plus, a few clicks to their pages will tell you how their internal linking is done.
You can find that sitemap on most sites at example.com/sitemap.xml or example.com/sitemap_index.xml or at example.com/sitemap. Sometimes a website doesn’t have a sitemap, but tools like Screaming Frog and Sitebulb might help you out. Crawl the site and order by URL.
Blog
Do you have a blog? If not, you probably should. A blog makes for dynamic content, and keeps your site current. And, if you post regularly, Google will find all kinds of interesting and recent ‘Last Updated’ dates.
Check if your competitor has a blog, and if theirs ranks better than yours. If so, they’ve probably woven their blog into their content strategy.
Step 5: Compare UX
Great UX makes for a better time on your site, more page views, and a lower bounce rate. We’re not getting into UX too much here, because we think you should first focus on other things in your competitive analysis. However, we wanted to highlight two things: call to action and contact pages.
Call to action
A great call to action helps any page. Whether it’s to drive sales or engagement, every page needs a proper call to action. Simply go over some of your competitor’s pages and see how they went about this. See if you can grab some ideas, and improve your own call to action. Oh, and remove that slider and/or video background. That’s not a call to action. That’s a call to no action. (If you really must include one, make sure you at least optimize your video background in the right way).
Contact page & address details
Your contact page and address details could be the end goal of a visit to your page. If so, check how the competition created that page. Did they add structured data, for instance? Is there a contact form? Did they make it easier to find these details than you did? If comparing this sparks some great ideas, then adjust your site accordingly.
Step 6: Perform a backlink analysis
Last but not least: if all seems reasonably the same, and there is no logical way to explain why your competitor outranks you, it might just be that the other website has a great deal more relevant links than you do. Or simply better ones. You’d have to check Ahrefs.com, Moz’s OpenSiteExplorer or, for instance, Searchmetrics for this.
Follow-up on your competitive analysis!
At this point, you know the main differences between your competitor’s site and yours. This is the moment where you start prioritizing optimizations and get to work. First, take care of low-hanging fruit. Fix things that are easily fixed. Next, determine what issues might have the biggest impact on your rankings, then solve these as well. If you are a regular visitor to this blog, you’ll probably have no problem with this. Our tip? Go for any speed and content issues first, and try to get more backlinks in the process.
At Yoast, we believe that the best SEO strategy is a holistic approach. With a holistic approach, SEO has a lot of “teammates” that have to work together. Simply optimizing your page titles isn’t enough. You also need to work on aspects like site speed, great content, and user experience (UX). In this post, we’ll focus specifically on the areas where SEO and UX meet. Why? Because both are vital topics to pay attention to if you’re running a website.
Common page elements that influence both SEO and UX
If you look at the basic elements on a page that influence your SEO, you’ll find a close relationship between SEO and user experience (UX). Below, we’ll discuss a few of these elements.
Page titles and headings
In general, understanding how to use the headings on your site is quite important. Why? Because they benefit your SEO and your users. An optimized page title and a related, visible
element will tell Google what your page is about. But the page title and
element also inform your visitors what the page is about. In addition, subheadings such as
also help both Google and your visitors to scan a page and grasp the general idea of that page’s content.
External links
What about external links? They’re great for SEO, because they tell Google that you respect your sources. Plus, external links can increase the odds that your sources will link back to you in their content. For your users, however, external links provide a way to access background information. They also give you credibility, because external links show visitors that you’ve done your research.
Great content
If you provide quality content, people want to link to you, and visitors want to read what you have to say. Plus, they’re more likely to stay on your site. That’s great, because these incoming links and time-on-page are things Google will notice. In fact, Google could even start to consider your content as the main source of information on a certain topic. So focus on creating that quality content! For example, you can add images and videos to your posts and pages, which will make both Google and your users happy.
Site structure
Let’s say your post or page hasn’t fully answered the user’s question, then it’s great to point them to another page on your site. Why? Because you want to prevent users from clicking back to the search result pages. This is otherwise known as a bounce. A high bounce rate can have a negative influence on your SEO. It indicates to Google that you may not be answering your visitors’ search query.
One way to prevent a bounce is to make sure your site structure is clearly reflected on your page. In other words: No matter which pages a user visits, they know where they are on your website. It’s especially important that visitors know there’s more to explore on your site. So, how do you achieve this? Partly by creating (and maintaining!) an optimized menu, but also by making sure your website has a good structure. You can show your structure by using breadcrumbs, but you can also think along the lines of related posts and products. If you want more in-depth information, take a look at our site structure course!
And there’s another benefit to having a nice, hierarchical site structure: You make sure that Google can efficiently crawl your pages!
Site speed
You might already be familiar with site speed. Still, it’s good to address the topic again, because it heavily influences your SEO and UX. How? First, visitors don’t like waiting for your content to load. Just think about it: How long do you want to wait for a page to load? A few seconds at most, probably.
Second, Google only wants to spend a certain amount of time on your site to crawl it. That’s why it’s important to optimize your site speed. Try different techniques, such as lazy loading images. In addition, you can defer parsing of JS and CSS files where possible. That way, you make sure your page will show something as soon as possible.
Mobile experience
Nowadays, having a good mobile experience is extremely important. Luckily, the same rules that apply to your website also apply to its mobile version. It should be fast, well-designed, and have an easy-to-use navigation. After all, you want both users and search engines to quickly find what they’re looking for.
So think hard about the mobile version of your homepage! Does it cover the main areas of your website? Does it invite your visitors (and any search engine) to explore the rest of your website as well? Even button sizes could influence a user’s experience. You can always ask Google’s opinion on your mobile website via their mobile-friendliness test, or read our post on how to improve the mobile version of your site.
Conclusion: SEO and UX go hand in hand
As you can see, there are many areas where SEO and UX meet. It’s probably fair to say that almost every optimization that benefits your users (UX) will also have a positive effect on your SEO. And it’s the other way around too! If you deliver a poor user experience, you might see this reflected in the search result pages. Obviously, the impact may differ from optimization to optimization. But SEO and UX are clearly a great match in our larger concept of holistic SEO!
If you want to learn more about user experience (UX) and other essential SEO skills, you should check out our All-around SEO training! It doesn’t just tell you about SEO: it makes sure you know how to put these skills into actual practice!
As someone working on SEO, you must understand the importance of site speed. You must realize that fast sites equal happy users and happy search engines. PageSpeed Insights is an invaluable tool from Google that can help you optimize your website. It enables you to improve your rankings by giving you everything you need to boost the performance of your website. This guide will provide an overview of PageSpeed Insights. We’ll discuss what it is, how it works, and how you can optimize your website.
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What is PageSpeed Insights?
PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a free tool offered by Google. It provides valuable insights into the performance and speed of your pages. The tool evaluates website performance and page experience based on several key metrics, including loading speed, resource utilization, images, and other media optimization. PSI works at a page level, so a good score for a page does not automatically equal a good score for your entire site.
The tool provides a score from 0 to 100, with 100 being the “fastest” and most “performant” web page. Note that getting a score of 100 is not something you need to aim for by any means. But your pages should pass the general Core Web Vitals Assessment. Remember those words; you’ll hear them often — more on this topic further down this article.
The PageSpeed Insights page after running a test for cnn.com
PageSpeed Insights provides data on how quickly your page loads, how many resources it uses, and how many requests it makes when loading. Then it also offers suggestions on how to make your pages better. With the help of this tool, you can identify areas of improvement. Use that knowledge to make the necessary changes to improve your website’s rankings.
In addition, PageSpeed Insights also checks your page on SEO and accessibility aspects and other best practices. In this article, we’ll focus on site speed and performance checks.
To understand PSI and how it fits into the page speed part of SEO, please read the following articles:
How does PageSpeed Insights work?
PageSpeed Insights runs tests and analyzes the HTML, JavaScript, and other resources that make up your website. The tool then provides a detailed report highlighting areas where the page the test was run on can be optimized. These suggestions include specific recommendations for improving your website’s speed and performance. The tool evaluates how your site functions on desktop and mobile devices, ensuring you optimize your website for all users.
An insight into PageSpeed Insight
Here’s a little bit more insight into how the test process works:
URL analysis: The first step in the PSI process is examining the URL being tested. This URL can be any online content with a valid URL, such as a product page, blog post, or other web-based material. Remember that a PSI test is specific to this URL and doesn’t automatically translate to your overall website performance.
Retrieving page content: Once the URL is submitted, PageSpeed Insights will retrieve the page’s content, including the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and all other elements necessary to render the page.
Performance evaluation: After the page content is retrieved, PSI will conduct several tests to assess the page’s speed and efficiency. These tests analyze factors like page size and structure, resource quantity and size, and page load time.
Optimization recommendations: Based on the results of the performance tests, PageSpeed Insights provides suggestions for optimizing the page to improve it. These recommendations include reducing image size, simplifying CSS and JavaScript, enabling browser caching, and reducing the number of requests made to the server.
Scores: PSI will assign a score to the page based on its how it does. The score ranges from 0 to 100, with higher scores representing better performance. It calculates the score based on the test results and optimization recommendations.
It’s worth noting that PageSpeed Insights only assesses how a single page on your website performs. It does not take appearance or functionality into account. However, enhancing this often positively impacts how people perceive your site.
Google frequently updates PSI to provide the most current information and accurate results. By utilizing PageSpeed Insights, you can gain a deeper understanding of page performance. It helps you improve the user experience and increase your website’s overall speed and efficiency.
PSI metrics: lab data vs. field data
PageSpeed Insights offers a combination of laboratory and real-world data to help you comprehend and enhance your site’s functionality. The lab data represents a simulation of the website’s performance in a managed setting. The field data portrays actual metrics collected from real users visiting the website.
The lab data is obtained by conducting automated tests on the website through a standard testing environment. The tests assess load time, resource utilization, rendering speed, and more. Lab data provides a foundation for performance. It helps you spot problems impacting user experiences, like slow-loading recourses or unoptimized images. One of the weaknesses of lab data is that it’s for a specific point in time, and external factors like the weather, network stress, whether there’s a football game on, etc., can all affect real user experience. Your website needs to anticipate that.
The field data, on the other hand, delivers a more precise representation of how users encounter the website in the real world. This data is collected by monitoring users’ browsers and comes from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX). Field data offers valuable perspectives on user interaction with the website, such as which pages are slow or visually unstable. It also considers how factors like network connectivity and device type impact user experience.
Both laboratory and field data have advantages and limitations, making it crucial to use both to understand a website truly. Lab data provides a baseline and helps identify problems, while field data offers a more authentic view of user experience. By merging both data types, you can make informed choices on optimizing your website and enhancing the user experience.
Getting started with PageSpeed Insights
Starting with PageSpeed Insights is very easy. You can just enter the URL of the page you want to test into the tool and click the blue Analyze button. The tool will then run a series of tests on your page and generate a report. The report will provide a score for that specific URL’s performance and recommendations for improvement.
PSI only works at a page level. It looks at the one URL you enter to analyze — it is not a tool for side-wide analysis. Therefore, it’s good to test various pages of your site, as your homepage will perform differently from a blog post or a product page on your ecommerce site. Together, you’ll get a good sense of your site’s overall performance and where the bottlenecks are.
Enter your URL in the text field and hit the Analyze button
Getting the recommendation is easy, but implementing or fixing the issues is another story. The issues are prioritized, with the most pressing issues at the top. It also lists the opportunities it sees that help boost the scores of your page. The colored bar shows how many seconds you could save by implementing the improvements. Here, the red bars have the biggest impact on how your page performs.
Take action on the recommendations provided by the tool to improve your website’s performance. With PSI, you can start improving your website right away.
Key metrics evaluated by PageSpeed Insights
Some time ago, Google introduced the Page Experience algorithm update. With it came the Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics that measure the real-world user experience of a website. The Core Web Vitals include LCP, FID, and CLS. These metrics are crucial to determining how well a page scores on the test. This test aims to replicate a user’s experience loading and using a website.
Improving the Core Web Vitals of your website is essential for optimizing your website for both user experience and search engine rankings. You can ensure that your website loads quickly by improving your LCP, FID, CLS, and other key metrics. It provides users with a positive experience that will keep them on your website longer.
Some key metrics detailed
PageSpeed Insights evaluates the Page Experience of a site based on several key metrics, including:
First Contentful Paint (FCP): This metric measures the time it takes for the first content on a page to become visible to the user. A fast FCP helps ensure that users don’t have to wait long to see something on the screen after landing a page.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric measures the time it takes for the largest content element on a page to become fully visible to the user. A fast LCP is crucial for a good user experience, as it indicates when the page will likely be fully loaded and ready to use.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric measures the stability of a page during loading and user interaction. A low CLS score indicates that the page’s content does not shift around as it loads, providing a better user experience. The CLS forms 25% of the ranking weight.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP): This metric measures how a page responds to user interaction by updating the screen. A fast INP helps provide a smooth user experience, ensuring that the page reacts quickly to user inputs.
First Input Delay (FID): This metric measures the time a page responds to the first user interaction, such as clicking a button or entering text. A fast FID helps to ensure that the page reacts quickly to user inputs, providing a better user experience.
Time to First Byte (TTFB): This metric measures the duration from when a browser requests a page until the first byte of data from the server arrives at the client. TTFB is a crucial metric for website performance and user experience as it indicates any bottlenecks in the server-side processing or if the server is taking too long to generate the content.
Total Blocking Time (TBT): This metric calculates the time during which a website’s primary content is prevented from being displayed to users. This metric is significant as it reflects the period during which users cannot interact with the website or access its content, affecting the user experience. The TBT determines 30% of the ranking score.
The most recent scoring weights provided by Lighthouse for PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights also has a Speed Index
In addition to the Core Web Vitals and these additional metrics, PageSpeed Insights also considers other factors when calculating scores. The Speed Index is a metric that gauges the perceived loading speed of a website. It offers a rating based on the speed at which the website’s content becomes visible during the loading process, from start to finish.
The Speed Index is a crucial metric to be aware of and monitor, as it demonstrates how quickly users can view and interact with the website’s content. A website that loads quickly can increase user engagement, reduce bounce rates, and improve conversions. Thus, monitoring the Speed Index score and taking action to improve it, if needed, is important to you.
PSI also makes the loading process insightful with screenshots of your site
The scores in PageSpeed Insights provide a general indication of how well your page does. You should not see this as the only factor determining the overall user experience. By addressing the issues identified by PageSpeed Insights, you can improve performance and provide a better user experience.
The overview screen with Web Vitals scores
Opening the results screen, you see six colored bars of The Core Web Vitals Assessment. PageSpeed Insights provides a snapshot of how well a site performs based on three important metrics, the Core Web Vitals and three experimental metrics. These metrics evaluate crucial aspects of the user experience, including loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
The Core Web Vitals Assessment section
In the Core Web Vitals Assessment section, you’ll find an easy-to-understand evaluation of how the website performs for each of these metrics based on data. Further down the page, you’ll find suggestions for enhancing the website for each metric to improve the user experience.
In the diagnose performance issues section, you’ll find a graphic representation of the loading process of your page. It also features scores for performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO.
Keep an eye on these Core Web Vitals, and make a fast, responsive, and visually stable website. All of this is crucial for attracting and retaining users.
The Diagnostics screen lists improvements
The Diagnostics section in PageSpeed Insights provides in-depth insights and advice for enhancing your website. There is a lot to find here, but let’s look at a popular one as an example. One of its suggestions is to Reduce the impact of third-party code.
PSI shows which scripts block the loading of your page
Third-party code refers to scripts and widgets hosted on external servers and embedded into a website. These can significantly affect a site’s performance by slowing page load times and utilizing resources.
PageSpeed Insights helps you pinpoint the third-party scripts affecting your website’s speed. You can find this in the Reduce the impact of third-party code suggestion. It displays information about each third-party script’s size, type, and effect and recommends reducing its impact.
For instance, the tool may advise minimizing non-critical third-party scripts or optimizing script loading through lazy or asynchronous loading methods. Also, hosting third-party scripts on a content delivery network (CDN) to improve loading speed by reducing latency.
Following PageSpeed Insights’ suggestions in the Diagnostics section helps you minimize the impact of these issues.
How to improve your PageSpeed Insights score
Improving the performance of your site helps improve your PageSpeed Insights score. Below you’ll find a sampling of things you can do to make your site faster. We discuss this topic in more detail in our post on page speed.
Minimize the size of resources: The size of the resources on your website, such as images and other media, can significantly impact your website’s speed and performance. Minimizing the size of these resources can help reduce the time it takes for your website to load.
Optimize images:Optimizing images is one of the most effective ways to make your site faster. You can optimize images by compressing them, reducing their size, and converting them to a more optimized format.
Choose a better web host: The quality of your web host plays a critical role in the speed and reliability of your website. A good web host should provide fast and stable server resources, network connectivity, and a server location close to your target audience (with a CDN).
Use a content delivery network (CDN): A CDN can help distribute your website’s resources across multiple servers, reducing the load on your server and making your website perform better.
Minimize plugins: Plugins can slow down your website and negatively impact how it performs. Minimizing plugins and choosing lightweight, high-quality plugins can help improve your website’s speed and performance.
Use lazy loading: Lazy loading is a technique that only loads images and other resources when needed rather than loading them all at once. This can help reduce the time it takes for your website to load.
By following these tips, you can improve your PageSpeed Insights score. The result is a faster, performant website that provides a better user experience and ranks higher in search results.
Conclusion
PageSpeed Insights is an invaluable tool for everyone working on the SEO of their sites. The tool provides valuable insights into how your website performs and how fast it loads. Make sure that you understand the key metrics evaluated by PageSpeed Insights. After that, optimize your website accordingly. This way, you can improve the performance, resulting in a better user experience. In turn, that might lead to higher rankings in search engines!
We’ve said this time and time again: a fast website is necessary for SEO. In a sea of similarly good (or not-so-good) results, Google will favor fast pages that can deliver a good user experience to searchers. If your goal is to attain higher rankings and drive organic traffic from Google, you need to speed up your WordPress website. In this post, we’ll discuss tips to help you improve your website performance to get that spot in the search results!
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Fast websites perform better on Google
Fast websites tend to outperform slow ones on Google because of one good reason – good user experience, and this aligns with Google’s mission. Google wants to deliver the best results and the best experience for their users. Hence, they want to show users web pages that will answer their search queries and provide a good experience. That’s also why page experience is now a ranking factor in Google.
This makes perfect sense when you put it in context. We’ve all had moments where we click on a link only to hit the back button because it takes so long for the page to load. And when we leave a page (or bounce off a page) like that, we’re way less likely to visit the website again because we know there are better, faster pages to browse. So website performance not only affects user experience but also greatly shapes how visitors judge the quality of your business.
That’s why speeding up your WordPress website is beneficial in many ways. A fast site makes your users happy, they’ll engage and buy more on your site. Ultimately, that’ll make you happy. Apart from that, It also makes search engines happy because it’s easier for them to crawl and index your site, thus reducing the resources and electricity they need to spend on those processes.
Don’t I need to focus on Core Web Vitals for SEO?
Yes, we hear you! It’s true that Core Web Vitals is an important part of the page experience ranking factor, and passing Core Web Vitals is essential for higher rankings. Metrics in Core Web Vitals directly measure your page speed, so improving your Core Web Vital scores may result in higher rankings, provided that you have good content already.
While metrics in Core Web Vitals measure the performance of a page, they don’t tell the whole story about your website performance. And Core Web Vitals only measure performance on a page level. So on a site level, you may have pages that pass Core Web Vitals and slower ones in the mix.
By making various improvements to your website performance, you can ensure that your visitors will get the most out of your website regardless of the page they land on. Besides, adopting website optimization best practices also directly benefits your Core Web Vitals and helps to reduce the time spent optimizing pages for speed.
This post is about general guidelines and best practices that will help you speed up your WordPress website. But if you specifically care about getting better CWV scores, check out 5 tips to improve your Core Web Vitals. You will also find a few similar pieces of advice in this post.
How to speed up your WordPress website
Now, WordPress is a simple platform at a first glance, but it’s quite complex under the hood. There are lots of different moving parts, with lots of databases to pull data from when you need to show a page to a user. And when you add lots of pages, media content and install lots of plugins and widgets, your site performance might start to drop.
Fortunately, WordPress is very versatile so there are many things you can do to optimize your performance. Let’s go over some of the tips to help you speed up your site.
1. Choose a great hosting provider and a good hosting plan
Let’s start from the top, having a good hosting provider is crucial for ensuring your website performance. That’s because all your files and databases are stored on their server, which will be called upon when a user requests a page.
A good host will have fast and stable servers. Stable means they have good “uptime”, which essentially means their server is always up and running, ensuring that your website is always accessible. On the other hand, a “fast” server refers to the specification of the computers/machine on which your website lives.
Good hosting providers also offer scalability to handle traffic spikes. A good host will have the resources to accommodate the increased load and ensure that your website remains up and running.
Next to that, customer support quality is another important factor to consider when choosing a host. A good host should provide technical support, which can be invaluable when you encounter any issues with your website. A knowledgeable support team can also help you resolve problems quickly, so you can get back to business as usual.
Another thing to consider is the server location relative to your users. If the server is fast, but it’s located far away from your users, then they might still experience slow-loading pages.
If you’re looking for the best fit when it comes to hostings, we’ve vetted some top-notch hosting companies to help you out.
2. Update your PHP to a newer version
Updating your PHP to a new version is a simple thing to do that often gets overlooked. PHP, or Hypertext Preprocessor, is a popular open-source server-side scripting language widely used for creating dynamic and interactive websites. By using PHP, web developers can build robust, feature-rich websites that can dynamically change based on user interactions, database information, and more
Updating your PHP to the newest version will greatly increase your website performance. You will get:
Improved performance, resulting in faster processing time and reduced resource usage.
Better memory management, which can reduce the amount of memory needed to run your WordPress site, resulting in faster page load times.
Faster request processing, as new versions of PHP are able to process requests more quickly, leading to faster page load times.
Some newer versions of PHP also have improved caching capabilities, allowing for faster page load times and reduced server resource usage.
You can check out endoflife.date to see which PHP version is in development and which version isn’t supported anymore.
Since it’s a server-side scripting language, many hosting providers offer PHP support as part of their hosting packages. If you’re looking to update your PHP, check with your host to see if they can help you with that.
It is important to note that updating PHP can cause compatibility issues with your WordPress plugins and themes. A compatibility issue can cause the website to break, so it is important to make a backup before updating and to test the website after updating to make sure everything works as expected.
3. Update your WordPress version is an easy fix
Advice as old as time! But it does work so we can’t go without mentioning it. You can gain a nice speed boost just by updating your WordPress website to a newer version. You get the latest performance improvements and lots of other optimizations. What’s not to like about that!
WordPress 6.1, for instance, got a bunch of performance improvements under the hood, such as better database performance and better handling of media delivery. On the front end, this results in faster load time for both new and returning visitors.
Additionally, updating to a new WordPress version allows you to run a newer version of PHP, which also gives you all the more performance improvements.
To be cautious, one piece of advice we have is to test an update on a staging environment before you update your live website. See if the update causes issues, check if there are any plugin conflicts, and make sure everything works as intended. You can check the WordPress.org forum or Twitter to see if the update causes issues for others.
4. Implement a caching solution
Caching is an important part of the performance equation. It’s a simple solution that can speed up your WordPress website and make your pages load faster, especially for returning visitors.
Caching refers to the process of storing frequently accessed data in a temporary storage area. Rather than being fetched from the server each time the data is requested, it can be quickly retrieved from the cache when needed.
This helps to reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred between the server and your visitor’s browser, resulting in faster page load times and improved overall website performance. So every time a visitor access a recently-viewed page, the page will be served from the cache instead of having to request all the elements like HTML and images from various databases.
You can rely on caching plugins to do the work for you. For the most part, they’re quite easy to use. Be careful when installing multiple caching or optimization plugins though. They can get in each other’s way, and slow down your site!
Some of our recommendations for caching plugins:
WP Rocket – Very powerful, and one of the best options to make your site faster. Designed to be simple. No free option.
W3 Total Cache – Extremely powerful, and extremely flexible. Designed to be comprehensive. Hundreds of checkboxes and options.
NitroPack – Full page caching with some really clever, cutting-edge performance optimization techniques. Tons of impressive bells and whistles, though the pricing model scales with pageviews.
WP-Optimize – A good middle ground, with basic full-page caching, and some sophisticated database + media optimization tools.
WP Super Cache – A basic solution that offers full page caching, but lacks other/advanced optimization techniques.
These plugin suggestions are derived from our top WordPress plugin recommendations post. There are a lot of good resources to help you build a better WordPress website on that page, so do check it out!
5. Use a lightweight theme
The theme you use greatly impacts how fast your pages load for users. Although WordPress offers a huge selection of themes to play around with, not all themes are created equally.
Some themes are better coded than others. Themes with inefficient or poorly optimized code can slow down page load times and cause you headaches along the way.
Some themes are much leaner than others. You might be drawn to themes with lots of bells and whistles, but be careful. Themes with many images, scripts, and other assets can increase the size of a page and make it slower to load. Sometimes, all you need is simplicity!
For the most part, our advice is to pick a fast and lean theme that’s well-reviewed by the community. They’re your best bet in a sea of choices. Always check the ratings and reviews to see if you’re making the right choice. Even though you can change theme later on, it’s better to just stick with one for a while. That’ll save you troubles that may arise from switching themes.
Apart from themes, many people like to use a page builder to design websites. It’s a great tool for beginners and experienced WordPress users alike. We have the same advice as with theme, that is to choose a popular and well-reviewed one. Some page builders are much lighter and more optimized for speed than others. Elementor, for instance, has done a bunch of work recently to speed up their builder.
6. Deactivate and remove unused plugins
WordPress is a wonderful platform thanks to its plugins and widgets, making it possible to extend a website in many ways. But it can be tempting to install a plugin for every little functionality that you want.
Although plugins can make your life easier, using too many of them is bad for your performance. Since there are more functionalities to load, they make your page load slower.
Really take a look at your plugin collection and asses which ones you need and which you don’t. And instead of using a plugin for every small functionality, use more versatile ones that can do multiple things you need.
For the ones that you don’t need, don’t forget to deactivate and delete them from your site. That’ll remove the additional codes they add to your website. This is an easy fix that may be ignored by some. Besides, unused plugins can cause conflicts with other plugins, themes, and core WordPress functionality. By removing them, you reduce the risk of compatibility issues, which can improve the stability and performance of your site.
7. Optimize your images: a quick fix to speed up your pages
We’ve said this many times, heavy images are detrimental to your page speed. Although eye-catching, high-definition images are a joy to look at, they make your pages much heavier. This means there are more things to process and load, resulting in a slower load time. For instance, having a large, unoptimized hero image above the fold will definitely lead to a low LCP score in Core Web Vitals.
You don’t actually need those high-resolution images. They only need to be sharp enough for everyone to easily make out what’s in them. There’s also a point of diminishing return where higher resolution doesn’t translate to better picture quality. The key is to find a sweet spot between resolution and quality.
Before uploading images to your website, make sure to compress them to reduce the file size. This is especially important if you’re displaying many images on your website or if you’re running an ecommerce website with lots of product images.
We recommend Compress JPEG & PNG images or Optimole to compress, optimize and manage your images. Squoosh.app is another great tool that we use to compress the social image of our posts, which is shown when our posts are shared on social media.
Want to go in-depth into image optimization? Check out our comprehensive image SEO guide!
8. Optimize your media delivery
The way you serve media content to end users can greatly impact your page speed, too. It’s crucial that you optimize and make tweaks to how your website delivers media content.
Lazy-loading is a popular technique that a lot of websites implement. It tells your user’s browser to load images only when they are needed, rather than loading them all at once when a page loads. Luckily WordPress does this natively so you can use that feature right out of the box. In addition, WordPress 6.1 also received a nice media delivery improvement, which is great for websites with lots of images. But even with all these features available, it’s still best to only add images when they are necessary.
As for videos, they can be useful in driving search traffic to your website. But we strongly advise you not to host videos directly on your server. They are heavy and can take up a lot of your server storage. Self-hosted videos will also make pages load slower, which is not what you want for SEO.
A better choice is to host videos on a video hosting platform like Youtube or Wistia and embed a link on your page. Next to that, make sure to use a process to show a preview image, and only load the video on interaction.
We also have a solution for optimizing videos for SEO – our Yoast Video SEO plugin! It adds the necessary structured data to videos on your website so Google can show them in rich snippets. The plugin will also supercharge your videos so they load more efficiently. If videos are an important part of your website and your SEO strategy, you need to use Yoast Video SEO!
9. Use a content delivery network
Content delivery networks (CDNs) won’t let you down when it comes to speeding up your WordPress website. It is incredibly important if you serve overseas users or those who live far away from your original web server.
A CDN is an interconnected network of servers working together to deliver content to your end users. They make copies of your static content like images or HTML files and distribute them on all the servers within the network. So instead of serving images or HTML files directly from your original servers, those files will be sent from the server closets to your users.
On the left: traffic to your site lands on a single server. On the right, a CDN sends visitors to the server nearest to their location. Image: Wikipedia
As we explain in our guide to CDNs, the same ‘do your own research’ principles apply here, too. You’ll need to find the best mix of performance, features, and price.
We’re huge fans of Cloudflare at Yoast (which we use to power all sorts of our own ecosystems), but it may not be the perfect fit for you.
When you’re choosing a CDN for WordPress, it’s worth making sure that they have a good plugin integration, so that page and resource caches are automatically updated or purged as you write or update your content (like the Cloudflare WordPress plugin).
10. Use fewer external scripts and optimize your JavasScript
A note before we go further: this section is a bit more advanced compared to the other advice in this post. It’s best not to tamper with any JavaScript if you’re new to website building, or if you don’t have any development experience. Instead, play it safe and ask an experienced developer to help you out with JavaScript tweaks and optimizations.
With that said, JavaScript is a wonderful language and allows us to do a lot of things on websites. It makes websites more dynamic and enjoyable for end users to use.
When you see animations on a website, like when you click a button and something pops up, that’s most likely thanks to JavaScript. For website owners, it allows them to add analytics tools like Google Analytics or Hotjar and do cool things like A/B testing or personalization.
But using too much JavaScript and external scripts makes a page load much slower. Loading external scripts can slow down the performance of your website, as the browser has to make additional requests to retrieve the scripts. We often see this on web pages with many external ads, which can be frustrating at times. By minimizing the number of external scripts, you can reduce the amount of data that needs to be loaded and improve page load times.
Too much JavaScript can also affect your crawl budget. That’s because Google needs to render these files while indexing, which takes up resources. The more resources Google needs to spend on processing those files, the less they have to come back and crawl other pages on your site.
There are many ways to reduce the amount of JavaScript you use, which greatly depends on your website and the type of scripts. Start by finding out what’s loading. Then you can decide to not load it, or change how it loads to make it load more efficiently by implementing defer or async loading.
Avoid loading stuff from external domains, like Google Fonts or resources from CDNs, and load local copies instead. Also, ask yourself if you can get the same result by using a different method than using a script. For example, you can use CSS instead of a script for animation.
11. Reduce files size
We mentioned that you can compress your images to reduce their file size. You can do the same with your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, too.
Although the number of bytes and kilobytes you shaved off these files doesn’t sound like much, they can add up. One way to reduce file size is to reduce the redundant spacing or lines in your code. You can also combine multiple files into a single file, compress it and still serve that file without breaking your site.
Tampering with codes never sounds like a great idea, especially if you’re not a developer. But thankfully we have plugins to help us out. You can check out:
Autoptimize, which has some really clever JavaScript, CSS, and HTML optimization.
WP Minify, which also allows you to combine and compress JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files.
12. Reduce HTTP requests to your server
Every time a user clicks on a link to visit your website, their browser has to make multiple HTTP requests to your web server asking for various files and data. The server has to process these requests and send back all the necessary files so the browser can render them and show the page to the user.
Reducing the amount of HTTP requests here basically means reducing the number of files the server has to retrieve and send to your user’s browser. That will help with decreasing the amount of data transferred and decreasing the load on your server, as well as making it easier for the browser to render and construct a page.
If you’ve already implemented all the tips we mentioned above, then you’re already removing quite a bit of unnecessary HTTP requests. That involves using fewer plugins and scripts, including fewer media files, implementing a caching solution, and using a CDN to serve static content.
Wrapping up
Congratulations on making this far into the post! We hope this post will be useful in helping you speed up your WordPress website. We know there’s a lot of information here, so do take some time to process and digest it.
By implementing the techniques and best practices we suggest, you’ll be on your way to building a fast and snappy website! Don’t forget to document the changes you make and evaluate the impact on your website’s search presence, organic traffic, as well as overall website performance.
When every millisecond can make the difference between a visitor buying or leaving, there’s always more room for performance optimization. We regularly review the setup and configuration of our hosting, CDN, plugins, and theme – and so should you.
Got a great recommendation for speeding up WordPress or other site speed tools? Let us know in the comments!
More resources to help you speed up your WordPress website
These articles and documentation can provide more information on website speed optimization. Have a read!
For most sites, SEO in 2023 will probably be similar to the past couple of years: you still need to improve your work but set the bar higher and higher. Competition is getting fiercer, and Google — and your potential customers — are getting better at recognizing true quality. Also, you should keep an eye out for technological advancements like ChatGPT, as they might make for an exciting year. Here, you’ll get a quick overview of SEO in 2023.
Table of contents
2022 is over; now what?
2022 was a weird year. It might have been a somewhat positive year for most of us — although we’re in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, with a recession looming. The pandemic is still around but has taken a back seat in most places. If we look at our industry, SEO, we see that the online world has made a big jump. A lot of businesses moved online. Many people have shopped online for the first time, and many of them will keep doing that. There’s never been a better time to build an online business.
With a recession looming, SEO will likely become even more important. It’s one of the most cost-effective ways of reaching an audience — plus, it’s relatively easy to do. You can rely less on external platforms and more on the one that you fully control: your website.
So, with all these people waiting for your content — how would you use SEO in 2023?
It’s all about quality and E-A-T
2023 is all about quality and authority. Improving quality across the board should start with determining what you do. Please look at your products and services and the way you describe these. Have you had any trouble telling what you do? You may need to go back to the drawing board. Your product must be excellent, as there is no use in trying to rank a sub-par product. No one would fall for that. A killer product needs a killer site and a killer plan to get that site noticed.
Increasingly, Google looks at other signals to determine the value of your offer and yourself. These signals, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (or E-A-T) help it to discern the real from the fake, so to speak. The web is already rife with sub-par content, and the advent of new artificial intelligence content writers might flood it with even more. Quality, originality, authority, trustworthiness, and expertise will be where you will be judged on. And the recent addition of Experience to the E-A-T acronym shows Google is not done with its focus on this ranking factor.
Google will build out the Helpful Content system that it launched earlier in 2022 to help uncover truly good and original stuff.
SEO in 2023
For years, we heard talk about AI taking over the world, and 2023 might be the year that could happen. The launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 was a bombshell for many, and it was followed by a ton of new tools and developments. Plus, all the news surrounding the chat AI helped it reach a vast audience, which will surely help it get into the mainstream. ChatGPT could dramatically reshape how we search for answers, write our content, and much more. Now, it’s still early days, but keep a close eye on it and related technologies.
There’s a ton of other stuff happening as well. 2023 will also see much more visual and intelligent ways of searching and finding, like the multisearch stuff that Google introduced. Images will play a big part in how people will find you, so be sure to make these as good as possible.
There will also be a renewed interest in SEO as marketers will get trouble tracking their success on other platforms due to various legal changes, like a possible ban on Google Analytics in Europe. Cookies are also about to die. Even though tracking will continue in different forms, it’s time to invest in SEO before others flock to SEO.
Take note of these developments to see where search is heading, but for this moment, for most sites, it’s all about improving what you have right now. Site quality is critical. Content quality is vital. So, these SEO trends for 2023 are not hyped-up stuff but subjects we’ve been hammering home for a while. Remember Holistic SEO?
Improve site quality
If you’ve been playing this SEO game for a while, you’ve been working on your site for a long time. Over the years, there’s been a lot of talk about all the things you should focus on because that’s what the search engines would be looking at. Experts claim to know many factors that search engines consider to rank a piece of content for a specific term. That’s not possible. While nobody knows precisely what happens behind the scenes of a search engine, you can look back over a more significant period to determine trends. One thing that always keeps popping up?
Quality.
To win in SEO in 2023, your site needs to be technically flawless, offer a spectacular user experience and high-quality content, and target the right audience at the right time in their user journey. And, of course, your site’s speed and user experience need to improve. It also means incorporating and improving Schema.org structured data, as structured data remains one of the critical developments for some time.
Let’s review some of the things you need to focus on in 2023.
A better Page Experience with good Core Web Vitals
As part of an effort to get sites to speed up and to provide a great user experience, Google announced the Page Experience algorithm update that rolled out in 2021. This update gives you another reason to put site speed front and center. While the Page Experience update didn’t shake up the SERPs, we expect it to continue to become a stronger signal.
Site speed has always been critical. If you can’t keep up with your competition now, you’ll soon find yourself having a more challenging time keeping up if you’re not speeding up your site. If one of your competitors becomes a lot faster, you become slower by comparison, even when you’re not becoming slower. Improving loading time is a lot of work, but as it might make you much faster than the competition, it’s an excellent tradeoff.
Start by finding a better hosting plan — one of the quickest ways to speed up your site! — and optimizing your images with image SEO.
Enhance the user experience
Page experience ties in with user experience. Is your site a joy to use? Can you find what you need in an instant? Is the branding recognizable? How do you use images? Improving the user experience is a surefire way to make your — potential — customers happy. Happy customers make happy search engines!
Untangle your site structure
Loads of sites were started on a whim and have grown tremendously over time. Sometimes, all those categories, tags, posts, and pages can feel like the roots of trees breaking up a sidewalk. It’s easy to lose control. You might know that keeping your site structure in check is beneficial for your visitors and search engines. Everything should have its proper place, and if something is old, outdated, or deprecated, maybe you should delete it and point it to something relevant.
This year, you should pay special attention to your site structure. Re-assess your site structure and ask yourself if everything is still where it should be or if improvements need to be made. How’s your cornerstone content strategy? Is your internal linking up to scratch? Are redirects screwing up the flow of your site? The SEO workouts in Yoast SEO Premium can help you get started on this.
Implement Schema.org structured data
Structured data with Schema.org makes your content instantly understandable for search engines. Search engines use structured data to connect parts of your page and the world around it. It helps to provide context to your data. Besides making your site easier to understand, adding structured data makes your site eligible for rich results. There are many rich results, from star ratings to image highlights, and search engines continue to expand this. Structured data forms the basis of many developments, like voice search and Google’s ecommerce push.
Implementing structured data has never been easy, but we’re solving that problem. Yoast SEO automatically outputs a complete graph of structured data, describing your site and content in detail for search engines — and connecting everything. For specific pages, you can describe the content in the Schema tab of Yoast SEO. Also, our structured data content blocks for the WordPress block editor let you automatically add valid structured data by simply picking a block and filling in the content. We now offer blocks for FAQ pages and How-to articles, with more on the way. In addition, we also have an online training course on structured data to help you improve your SEO in 2023.
The FAQ block in Yoast SEO makes it easy to get rich results for your FAQs
Mobile still needs your focus
We’ve talked about mobile for years, but we must remind people to take it seriously. Since Google switched to mobile-first indexing, it judges your site by how it works on mobile, even when most of your traffic is from the desktop. Give your mobile site special care and work on its mobile SEO. You should test whether your site works as well on mobile and desktop. Is the structured data functioning and complete? Do images have relevant alt-texts? Is the content complete and easy to read? Could you make it lightning-fast, easy to use, and valuable?
In 2022, many people experienced mobile shopping for the first time, and they will come back for more in 2023. If you sell stuff online, be sure to optimize the checkout process of your ecommerce site — make it as short and focused as possible!
Content quality
There is a ton of content out there — and a lot of new content is published daily. Why should your content be in the top ten for your chosen focus keyphrases? Is it perfect enough to beat the competition? Are you publishing original, all-encompassing content that answers the questions your audience has?
Keep search intent front and center
Search intent is the why behind a search. What does this person mean to do with this search? Is it to find information or to buy something? Or maybe they’re just trying to find a specific website. Or is it something else entirely? Search engines are better at understanding this intent and the accompanying user behavior. Thanks to breakthroughs in natural language processing with BERT and MUM, Google is starting to know the language inside out. In 2023, we’ll see Google use these new skills to bring better and more accurate search results — and present them in innovative ways.
Of course, we can still help search engines pick the correct version of our content. By determining the intent behind a search, you can map your keyword strategy to a searcher’s specific goals. Map these intents to your content, and you’re good to go.
Re-do your keyword research
The last two years were impactful for many of us, and a lot has changed. Keeping this in mind, it’s high time to re-do your keyword research. There is bound to have been an enormous amount of change in your market. Not only that, your company itself is bound to have changed. Not updating your keyword research means missing out on significant opportunities. Read up on the research about consumer trends for 2023 and beyond. After that, ask yourself these questions:
What changed in my company?
What changed in and around my audience?
Has something changed in people’s language?
What has changed in where people search?
Content is context
Context is one of the essential words in the SEO field. Context is what helps search engines make sense of the world. As search engines become more innovative and intelligent, providing them with as much related information as possible is becoming more critical. By offering the necessary context about your subject and entities, you can help search engines make the connection between your content and where that content fits in the grand scheme of things. It’s not just content; the links you add and how you add these links also provide context that helps search engines. Also, Schema structured data provides another way to show search engines how entities are connected.
By mapping the context of your subject, you might find a hole in your story. It could be that you haven’t fully explored your topic. Or maybe you found new ways of looking at it, or perhaps the recent developments threw you a curveball. Who knows! Stay on top of your topic and incorporate everything you find. Sometimes, it also means going back through your old content to update, improve or fix things — or delete stuff entirely.
Re-assess the content and quality of your most important pages
If you are anything like us, you have been at this game for a while and produced loads of content. That’s not a bad thing, of course, unless you are starting to compete with yourself. Keyword cannibalization can become a big issue, so content maintenance is a thing. Keep an eye on the search results of your chosen focus keyphrase. Do you have multiple articles in the top ten for a specific keyphrase? Is that what you want to happen?
You need to re-assess your content to find out how you are doing. Is everything in tip-top shape? Do you need to write more? Or less? Maybe combine several weaker articles into one strong one? Content pruning is going through your posts to see what you can take to improve the rest. Sometimes, the best SEO strategy can be to hold the writing for a while and improve what you have!
Work on your expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T)
Now search engines can understand the content; they are increasingly looking at its value. Is it trustworthy? Who is the person claiming these things? Why should we trust the author? Is the author an authority on the subject? Google looks not just at the quality of the content but also at whether that content can be assessed professionally. Trust and expertise will be essential, especially for YMLY (Your Money or Your Life) pages, like medical or financial content. E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) looks at this and is becoming a more significant part of SEO in 2023. What’s more, at the end of 2022 even added an extra letter to the acronym: Experience!
Hone those writing skills!
Quality content is well-written content. Quality content is original, in-depth, and easy to understand. Search engines are improving at determining an article’s text quality and making decisions based on that. Also, readers value well-written texts more and get a sense of trust from them. If content reads well and is factual and grammatically correct, it will come across as more professional, and people will be more likely to return to read more of your content.
While it is increasingly challenging to write all that high-quality content yourself, artificial intelligence might help make your job easier. AI content generators are getting better by the day and have reached a level that produces pretty good content. So why not make use of these tools, I hear you say?
Having an AI tool write your content doesn’t lead to high-quality, unique, authentic stuff. An AI has been trained on stuff that we already know, so there is no way for it to write something unique. Please take care in using tools like this. Of course, there’s no harm in having an AI speed up your work, getting you inspired, and helping you set stuff up. Be sure to edit the outcome into something you are proud of.
It will be interesting to see Google’s reaction to the flood of AI-generated content that is bound to arrive in 2023. They will probably focus even more on identifying E-A-T signals in content to try and discern AI content from content written by expert humans.
As much as we’d like everything to happen on our website, it’s not. Depending on where you are and what you’re doing, your search engine optimization might need to happen elsewhere, not specifically in Google. Search is moving beyond the website or social media platform for investigations and actions. Loads of devices can answer a spoken question with a spoken answer. Machines that can book tickets for you or reserve a table. There are powerful e-commerce platforms that seem to get most of the product searches, not to mention all those app-based services. Visual search is also on the rise. TikTok is huge in certain demographics. Maybe these have value for you?
(Progressive web) apps
Links to apps continue to pop up in search, especially on mobile. Many sites bombard you with links to their apps on the home screen. Some services are app-only, like Uber. Apps are everywhere; even Google is testing structured data for software apps. Moreover, Google has expanded its mobile homepage with the Discover app that suggests new content based on your interests.
Where there’s an app, there’s a customer to reach. Uber might be the ultimate taxi-hailing service, but why can’t a local taxi company replicate that? Apps offer another way — and sometimes a better way — of reaching your audience. Depending on your product and market, looking into apps might be a good idea. If you’re not willing to go down the native route, there are always progressive web apps — which we’ll see a lot of this year!
Video
Video content is incredibly popular! And there’s no end in sight for the video boom. YouTube might be the most crucial search engine for many people besides Google. We’ve seen the arrival of short-form content providers like TikTok and several enhancements in how video gets presented on the search results pages. You can count on it that video content will only become more critical. If you have the means, invest in video. Remember, it doesn’t always have to be flashy and professional — make it heartfelt. In addition to our Video SEO WordPress plugin, we also have a ton of content on how to do video SEO well.
Other platforms
Traditionally, many searches happen not on search engines but social media and other platforms. These past years, we’ve seen a steady decline in traffic and conversion from social media. Different platforms are taking their place. YouTube is a powerful search engine, as is Amazon. Plus, there are all those short-form videos going around. Maybe that’s something to attract a new audience? Also, did you see the meteoric rise of alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo and Neeva? People are getting more privacy-aware, which is a good thing! Depending on the searcher and their goal, platforms like these are becoming increasingly important. Indeed, something to think about!
Don’t just think: “I need to publish a blog post on my website” — there are so many great destinations out there that might fit the goal of your message better.
A system for getting traffic with SEO in 2023
What does it all boil down to if we recap all this? We know it sounds easy when you read it like this, but this is what you should keep in your head at all times:
A lot has changed in the last two years, so restart your research and read up on consumer trends for 2023.
You should have a fast, easily usable, technically flawless website with high-quality content that genuinely helps visitors.
This website must be supported by a brand offering high-quality products and services.
SEO in 2023: What’s next?
It’s easy to say that your site must be better than ever in 2023 because it’s true! Those ten blue links and rich search results are what it’s all about for most sites. The majority of traffic will still come from organic searches. Social media traffic is down, and conversational search is rising, but not enough to put a dent in organic. And then there’s video. Ultimately, you must keep improving your site in all the right places.
Of course, much other stuff is happening simultaneously, and most of it concerns an ever-changing Google. Next year, we might see Google less like a search engine and more as a virtual assistant — a person who lives on your phone and solves your problems. And that’s what they want to get to. It’s been a promise for a long time, but now we’re starting to see it with all these rich results and answer boxes. This will be interesting to watch.
Page speed is one of the factors which determines whether you get a good ranking in Google. Page speed is aranking factor, and its importance keeps growing. In this post, we’ll discuss how to check your page speed and which tools can help you do just that. Read on!
Why is page speed important for SEO?
For starters, a fast website provides a much better user experience than a slow one. Research has shown time and again that people don’t buy as much from slower sites. They also don’t read or engage as much on slow sites. That in itself should be enough reason to make sure the speed of your web pages is as good as it can be.
Beyond just being better for users, faster websites can be easier for search engines to crawl, process and index. That means your posts will take less time to show up in the search results. And they’ll be more likely to perform and rank better.
Page speed is not a single metric
We’ve written an extensive post about the concept of page speed and its importance. Long story short, page speed is not a single metric. You should not think of page speed as in “this page loads in 5 seconds”.
This is due to the complexity of various factors that affect the loading speed of a web page. Some of these factors include the infrastructure of your web server, the quality of the internet connection of your users, and the technical setup of your website (i.e: themes, plugins). And it’s not possible to determine the definitive loading speed of a page either.
Even if you try to simplify all of this to something like “the time it takes until it’s completely loaded“, it’s still tricky to give that a useful number. For instance, you can run an analysis that shows you that your page loads in 5 seconds. But this number may only apply to a percentage of your users. Someone who lives further from your web server, with a slower internet connection, and uses a slower device will experience a longer load time.
Instead, we advise you to think of page speed as a part of the user experience that your website provides. Page speed and user experience go hand-in-hand.
Make a page “feels” like it loads faster
In an ideal world, we’d click on a link in the search result page and the web page would appear instantly before our eyes. But we all know that our technologies haven’t reached that point yet. At the same time, websites nowadays are incredibly complex, with web pages getting heavier and harder to load.
Now, the challenge for website owners is not only to make pages load faster, but also to give visitors the “perception” that the page is indeed fast. In fact, being able to deliver the “perception” that a page is fast is crucial, as it ties into the “experience” that visitors get on your website. In order to create this “perception” of a fast-loading page, it’s good to get a grasp of the loading process of web pages.
Web page loading process 101
From the moment when you click on a link or hit ‘enter’ in your URL bar, a process begins to load the page you requested. That process contains many parts, but they can be grouped into several stages which look something like this:
Please note that the above model refers to the delivery and rendering of content above the fold. The model is also mobile-centric.
While Google’s documentation might be a bit ambitious about the timings of these stages, the model is helpful. Essentially, the process can be described in three stages of loading. Let’s discuss these three stages and what they mean to your pages.
Network stage
DNS lookup and TCP connection: Without going too much into detail, you can understand that these are protocols to establish communication between your web server and the user’s device. Essentially, they are what make transferring data via the internet possible.
Generally speaking, you don’t have a whole lot of control over what happens here. It’s also hard to measure or impact this part of the process. But it’s good to note that there are technologies that exist to speed up this process, including CDN, intelligent routing, etc. However, these technologies are more useful for sites that serve large international audiences. If you have a site that serves mostly local audiences, there are other things that you can do to speed up your pages.
Server response stage
HTTP request and response: After a connection is established, your user’s device sends a request to your web server asking for the page and its accompanying files and content. Your web server must process this request and prepare the requested content. Your hosting infrastructure, your web server, and the availability of a CDN have an impact on this stage.
Server response time: Server response time refers to the time it takes for a server to return the initial HTML, excluding the network transport time. This stage is about how fast your web server can return information. Your hosting infrastructure, web server, themes, and plugins can affect this stage.
Browser-rendering stage
Client-side rendering: This stage is where the page needs to be constructed, laid out, colored in, and displayed. The way in which images load, in which JavaScript and CSS are processed, and every individual HTML tag on your page affects how quickly things load. Themes and plugins also add additional elements to be rendered.
It’s good to realize that assets, content, and elements (i.e: buttons) on any given page are loaded in sequences. You can imagine that elements near the top of the page will be prioritized first, then elements closer to the bottom of the page will be loaded later on. This is also why Google emphasizes the importance of above-the-fold content in various documentation – it allows users to start interacting with a page as soon as possible. Additionally, being able to quickly load content on the top of a page also gives the perception that the page loads fast.
Metrics to pay attention to when checking page speed
Since 2021, Google introduced Core Web Vitals – a set of metrics to measure websites’ speed and user experience, which made their way into Google’s core algorithm update. Essentially, Core Web Vitals look at three aspects of a web page: loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability.
Loading – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures how long it takes for the most significant piece of content to appear on the screen.
Interactivity – First Input Delay (FID): Measures how fast the page can respond to the first user interaction.
Visual Stability – Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures the stability of visual elements on your page. In other words, does stuff move around on the screen while loading?
Metrics in Core Web Vitals
When optimizing your page performance for SEO, these three metrics are the most important to look out for. To pass Core Web Vitals, you need your page to get a green “score” for all these three metrics. And it’s good to know that at least 75% of your real-world users need to experience the green “score” in order for your page to have a pass.
Google’s John Mueller said that all three metrics must appear green if you want your site to benefit from the page experience ranking signals. Note that you shouldn’t optimize your site to get green scores – but having green scores will be beneficial for your visitors. It’s all about happy visitors – and great content, of course!
Other interesting metrics
In addition to these three metrics, it might be interesting to also look at:
Time to first byte (TTFB): Measures how long it takes until the server responds with some information. Even if your front-end is blazing fast, this will hold you up.
First contentful paint(FCP): Measures how long it takes for key visual content (e.g., a hero image or a page heading) to appear on the screen.
Time until interactive: Measures how long it takes for the experience to be visible, and react to user’s input.
All of the mentioned metrics are much more sophisticated metrics than “how long did it take to load”. And perhaps more importantly, they have a user-centric focus. Improving these metrics should correlate directly with user satisfaction, which is super important for SEO.
Now that you’ve got the basics about the concept of page speed and the web-loading process, it’s time to get practical and dive into the tools to check your page speed.
Your best friends are Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights.
Google Search Console
Essentially, data regarding Core Web Vitals and other page performance metrics are taken from PageSpeed Insights. But we want to point you to Google Search Console (GSC) first before going into PageSpeed Insights.
Assuming that you’re working on improving your page speed to gain competitive advantages in search ranking, then you’re probably using Search Console a lot already. Not only does the tool give an overview of your search performance, but it also provides a great overview of how your pages perform according to the page experience standards.
To see this report, go to Google Search Console and look for “Page experience” in the left navigation bar. You should see an overview of how your mobile and desktop pages perform.
The Page experience overview in Google Search Console
Take a look at the “Core Web Vitals” tab. There, you’ll find a list of URLs that are failing Core Web Vitals, which are conveniently grouped into categories that they are failing.
This is great because the tool presents you with an overview of the links you should work on. In addition, you already know beforehand what your objectives for these URLs are. For instance, you know whether you should work on improving the LCP or CLS score of a page.
Lists of groups of URLs failing Core Web Vitals
Clicking on one of these groups will prompt GSC to show you a few groups of URLs, based on their performance. For example, in the screenshot below, Search Console is showing URLs with low LCP scores, grouped based on the different LCP scores.
Clicking on one of these groups will show you the full list of URLs on your right bar. And if you click on an URL, a box will appear with a link that takes you to an audit of the page on PageSpeed Insights.
PageSpeed Insights
As we mentioned above, PageSpeed Insights provides you with data regarding your page performance. You’ll find metrics in Core Web Vitals and other metrics of a specific page.
This is an incredibly useful tool if you want to work on improving your page performance. It provides real user metrics of your website, straight from Google.
Results from PageSpeed Insights for yoast.com
If you scroll down a bit, you’ll find a diagnostic that provides you with the causes of why your page is failing Core Web Vitals. The reasons listed here are unique to a page and can range from a redundancy of third-party code, JavaScript error, lack of caching, etc,…
The tool also provides suggestions to optimize your page, which you can find under the “Opportunities” section. They are good starting points and can be helpful when you’ve just started out with speed optimization. But it’s good to know that following these suggestions may help your page to load faster, but they might not directly affect the performance score. There are also a bunch of other things you could do other than what’s listed here.
If you’re new to page speed optimization, then Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights probably give you enough information to start working. This section is more useful for those who would like to have more data and want to dive deeper into their website’s performance.
Tools to check server performance
These tools focus on the performance of server hardware, databases, and scripts. You may need to ask for help from your hosting provider or tech team.
We can check the performance of the server with tools like NewRelic or DataDog, which monitor how your site behaves and responds from the ‘inside’.
They’ll provide charts and metrics around things like slow database queries and slow scripts. Armed with this information, you can get a better understanding of whether your hosting is up to scratch, and if you need to make code changes to your theme/plugins/scripts.
WordPress has some great plugins for doing this kind of analysis, too. We recommend checking Query Monitor out. It provides some great insights into which bits of WordPress might be slowing you down – whether it’s your themes, plugins, or environments.
Another tool to check page performance
Another tool that may be interesting to look at is WebPageTest.org. This tool lets you test how your page performs on various types of networks and devices.
An interesting feature of this tool is the “waterfall” view. Essentially, it presents you with an overview of how much time it takes for all the assets on a page to load. This can be especially useful if you want detailed diagnostics to identify optimization opportunities.
For instance, the image below is the waterfall view of the homepage of Yoast.com. It looks quite daunting at first, but it does become easier to understand once you run the test yourself. Remember the model of the stages of the loading process we mentioned earlier? This waterfall view tells us that the first stage (DNS lookup and TCP connection) takes about 0.55 seconds to complete. Then the HTML file is sent from the web server to the browser (but not rendered) and then onto other assets.
WebPageTest.org results for yoast.com
Field data vs Lab data
Now that you’re equipped with the right tools to check your page speed, let’s talk about how these tools get their data.
Metrics in Core Web Vitals are measurable in the field and reflect the experience that your real-world visitors get. That’s why Google requires at least 75% of your real visitors to experience good page performance before giving you a pass. You can count on PageSpeed Insights to give you field data from real users.
In contrast, a tool like WebPageTest.org runs tests and collects data within a controlled environment, with predefined devices and network settings.
We know and understand the importance of field data since it captures true real-world user experience. It helps you to understand what your users struggle with. However, with field data, you run into the issue that you have limited debugging capabilities. Since every user is different, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly whether the changes you deploy are effective or not.
On the other hand, with lab tests, you can control for as many factors as you can, so the results are consistent and reproducible. And since field data is captured from real-world experience, it can only do so if users are able to enter and load your page. Lab data can help with identifying optimization opportunities and help make your site more accessible to a wider range of audience. Let’s say your goal is to optimize your site so users with a really slow connection can still access it. Running lab tests may give insights into what you can do to improve.
Which to prioritize?
Generally speaking, if you have both field and lab data on a page, you should prioritize using field data and base your optimization efforts on that. That means looking at the data in Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights. Google also recommends prioritizing field data. Since field data reflects the experience real-world users get, you can better understand what issues they are facing and what you need to do to fix those.
Wrap up
Learning how to check your page speed doesn’t need to be difficult. If you’re just starting out with page speed optimization, look to Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights. These tools will give you insights into which pages are falling Core Web Vitals and how real users experience your page.
From there, identify what your pages are lacking and focus your effort on optimizing your pages to pass Core Web Vitals. The suggestions that Google gives on PageSpeed Insights may provide you with a good starting point. However, don’t rely on them all the time. There is so much more you can do!
Did we miss anything in this post? Or do you have great tips on page speed optimization? Let us know in the comment!
In this day and age, page speed is everything. Not a day goes by without a new article, Google representative, or SEO expert telling us that optimizing for speed is among the most important things you should do for your website. And they’re right, of course! Page speed influences SEO in many ways. Here’s an overview of how page speed and SEO go together.
Table of contents
What is page speed?
“Page speed” refers to how fast the content on your page loads. It sounds simple; the faster your content loads, the quicker your page speed is. However, it’s good to understand that page speed is somewhat of an umbrella concept because there’s not a single metric that can define how fast your web page loads.
When discussing page speed in website performance, we should not consider it similar to how fast a car can go. A car can go 100km/h, and you can say that’s the car’s speed. But when talking about page speed, there is much more going on than just “this page loads in 4 seconds”. It’s much better to think of page speed as part of the user experience that your visitors will get when interacting with your website.
How to think about page speed
In an ideal world, you’d click a link in the search results, and the corresponding page would appear instantly. But we all know that’s a pipe dream. Over the years, pages have only increased in size, and the popularity of JavaScript made them even more complex and harder to load. Loading a web page can still be a drag, even with lightning-fast internet connections and potent devices.
Think about when you visit a web page. Do you wait for the page to load fully before interacting with it? Or do you start scrolling around and checking things right when you see content starts appearing? And if you start interacting with the page right away when there’s content, do you find missing elements (text, images, videos, buttons) when you scroll deeper on the page?
Here’s another question for you. Let’s say we have two pages. The first page quickly displays the first bits of content on your screen, but it takes longer before you can interact with things. The second page shows content a tad bit slower, but elements on the page, such as images and buttons, work properly. Between the two, which one would you say has better “page speed”?
As you can see, “page speed” is not necessarily about how fast a web page can load but more about how quickly it can provide a good user experience. Even if the page’s main content is quick to load, but other elements take longer to appear, you’ll still feel like the page is slow because you have to wait before you can interact with it.
There’s no single metric to define page speed
By now, you may understand that it’s tricky to define the “speed” of a web page or how “fast” a page is. Page speed is a multifaceted concept that can’t be determined using a single metric. Not to mention, many things affect the loading speed of a website, which we will get to later in this article.
When you click on a link to visit a web page, your browser has to make a request to the server of the website asking for content and other information. That content has to be loaded fully or partially on the browser before the user can interact with the page. At the same time, many things happen when a page gets loaded. You see things start appearing and popping up on your screen. After a brief moment, you can begin to interact with the page.
But when you take a step back and think about how we browse the web, we tend to interact with a page almost simultaneously when content appears on our screen. We tend not to wait for the page to load before we start exploring fully. At the same time, we don’t like it when we start scrolling, but things only pop up a bit later.
So to gauge the “speed” of a web page, we need to use several metrics in combination with each other to determine how fast and smooth the user experience on that page is. For that reason, Google introduced Web Vitals in 2020 – a set of metrics to measure websites’ speed and user experience. These metrics made their way into the Google core algorithm update in 2021, becoming the Core Web Vitals we know today.
Core Web Vitals give insights into your page speed
Core Web Vitals look at three aspects of a web page: loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. From those three aspects, Google defined the following metrics:
Loading – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric measures how long it takes for the most significant piece of content to appear on the screen.
Interactivity – First Input Delay (FID): This metric measures how fast the page can respond to the first user interaction.
Visual Stability – Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric measures the stability of visual elements on your page. In other words, does stuff move around on the screen while loading?
Metrics in Core Web Vitals
Google also set the standard measurements for each of these metrics and split them into three categories: good, need improvement, and poor. For instance, a page with a First Input Delay (FID) of below 300ms is considered poor, while above 100ms is considered good.
It’s worth noting that you have to meet or surpass the target performance in the “good” categories for 75% of your real-world visitors, in a 28-day period to pass Core Web Vitals. Generally speaking, that means three out of four visitors must experience the target level of performance or better.
If you’re looking to improve your page speed, it’s essential to know and understand these metrics. And with page speed improvement, you may also enhance your ranking on Google.
Differences between page speed and site speed
Some people use the term “page speed,” while others use “site speed” when discussing website performance. They are similar but surely not the same. Page speed only refers to the performance of a single web page, while site speed refers to the overall performance of a whole website.
It’s easier to measure the performance of a single web page as we have metrics in Core Web Vitals to work with. On the other hand, measuring the performance of a whole website is very tricky as a site can contain hundreds, even up to millions of pages. In addition, each of those pages behaves differently as they have different content and purposes.
Similar to “page speed,” you can’t define the speed of a website with a single metric. However, a website is just a combination of a bunch of web pages put together in a structured way. So let’s say most of your pages pass Core Web Vitals, then you can consider your site “fast.” If the opposite is true, you have slow “site speed.”
How important is page speed for SEO?
It’s a no-brainer that you want your website to be fast. A fast site means your pages load quickly. Of course, people come to your website for your content and your offers. However, that awesome and unique content must be accompanied by a good user experience.
Fast-loading sites have higher conversion rates and lower bounce rates
Attention spans are notoriously short. As the internet gets faster, they’re getting shorter still. Numerous studies have found a clear link between the amount of time a page takes to load and the percentage of visitors who will get bored of waiting. For instance, Google found out in their research that:
The probability of a visitor leaving a page without interacting increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds (thinkwithgoogle)
The probability of a visitor leaving a page without interacting increases to 90% as page load time goes from 1 second to 5 (thinkwithgoogle)
Your goal should be to be the fastest site in your niche. Be faster than your competitors. Having a site or an e-commerce platform that takes forever to load won’t do you any good. People hit that back button in a split second, never to return. With each bounced visitor, you are losing money and brand loyalty. Speed and efficiency are everything these days, so people won’t sit around waiting for your page when there are other alternatives.
By offering a fast site, you encourage your visitors to stay longer. Not to mention, you’re helping them get through their checkout journey faster. That helps improve your conversion rate and build trust and brand loyalty. Think of all the times you’ve been cursing the screen because you had to wait for a page to load or be running in circles because the user experience was atrocious. It happens so often — don’t be that site.
A fast page improves user experience
Google understands that the time it takes for a page to load is vital to the overall user experience. Waiting for content to appear, the inability to interact with a page, and even noticing delays create friction.
That friction costs time, money, and your visitor’s experience. Research shows that the level of stress from waiting for slow mobile results can be more stressful than watching a horror movie. Surely not, you say? That’s what the fine folks at Ericsson Research found a few years back.
Improving your site speed across the board means making people happy. They’ll enjoy using your site, buy more and come back more often. This means that Google will see your site as a great search result because you are delivering the goods regarding site quality. Eventually, you might get a nice ranking boost.
Frustration hurts your users and hurts your rankings
It’s not just Google – research from every corner of the web on all aspects of consumer behavior shows that speed significantly impacts outcomes.
Nearly 70% of consumers say that page speed impacts their willingness to buy (unbounce)
Nearly 50% of consumers admit they are willing to give up animation and video for faster load times (unbounce)
20% of users abandon their cart if the transaction process is too slow (radware.com)
The BBC found they lost an additional 10% of users for every additional second their site took to load
These costs and site abandonment happen because users dislike being frustrated. Poor experiences mean they go elsewhere, visit other websites, and convert to competitors. Google easily tracks those behaviors (through bounces back to search engine results pages, short visits, and other signals) and is a strong signal that the page shouldn’t be ranking where it was.
Google needs fast sites
Speed isn’t only good for users – it’s good for Google, too. Slow websites are often slow because they’re inefficient. They may load too many large files, haven’t optimized their media, or don’t make use of modern technologies to serve their page. That means that Google has to consume more bandwidth, allocate more resources, and spend more money.
Across the whole web, every millisecond they can save, and every byte they don’t have to process, adds up quickly. And quite often, simple changes to configuration, processes, or code can make websites much faster with no drawbacks. That may be why Google is so vocal about its education on performance.
A faster web is better for users and significantly reduces Google’s operating costs. Either way that means that they’re going to continue rewarding fast(er) sites.
Improve page speed helps to improve crawling for search engines
Modern sites are incredibly wieldy, and untangling that mess can make a big difference. The bigger your site is, the more impact page speed optimizations will have. That not only impacts user experience and conversion rates but also affects crawl budget and crawl rate.
When a Googlebot comes around and crawls your webpage, it crawls the HTML file. Any resources referenced in the file, like images, CSS, and JavaScript, will be fetched separately. The more files you have and the heavier they are, the longer it will take for the Googlebot to go through them.
On the flip side, the more time Google spends on crawling a page and its files, the less time and resources Google has to dedicate to other pages. And that means that Google may miss out on other important pages and content on your site.
Optimizing your website and content for speed will provide a good user experience for your visitors and help Googlebots better crawl your site. They can come around more often and get more done.
Page speed is a ranking factor
Google has repeatedly said that a fast site helps you rank better. So it’s no surprise that Google has been measuring the speed of your site and using that in their ranking algorithms since 2010.
In 2018, Google launched the so-called ‘Speed Update,’ making page speed a ranking factor for mobile searches. Google stressed it would only affect the slowest sites and that fast sites getting faster won’t get a boost, but they are looking at website performance across the board.
In 2021, Google announced the page experience algorithm update, demonstrating that page speed and user experience are intertwined. Core Web Vitals clearly state that speed is an essential ranking factor. The update also gave site owners metrics and standards to work with.
Of course, Google still wants to serve searchers the most relevant information even if the page experience is somewhat lacking. Creating high-quality content is still the best way to rank. However, Google also states that page experience signals become more important when many pages with relevant content compete for visibility in the search result.
The Speed Update, which enables page speed in mobile search ranking📱, is now rolling out for all users!
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) July 9, 2018
Google mobile-first index
Another significance of page speed for ranking is Google’s mobile-first approach to indexing content. That means Google uses the mobile version of your pages for indexing and ranking. This approach makes sense as we increasingly rely on mobile devices to go online. In recent research, Semrush found out that 66% of all website visits come from mobile devices
To compete for a spot in the search results, your mobile page needs to meet Core Web Vitals standards and other page experience signals. And this is not easy at all. Pages on mobile take longer to load compared to their desktop counterparts, while attention span stays the same. People might be more patient on mobile devices, but not a lot more. Take a look at some statistics:
The average website loading time is 2.5 seconds on desktop and 8.6 seconds on mobile, based on an analysis of the top 100 web pages worldwide (tooltester)
The average mobile web page takes 15.3 seconds to load (thinkwithgoogle)
On average, webpages on mobile take 70.9% longer to load than on desktop (tooltester)
A loading speed of 10 seconds increases the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing by 123% compared to a one-second loading speed (thinkwithgoogle)
All the more reasons to optimize your website and content if your goal is to win a spot in the SERP.
Factors that affect your page speed
Many factors affect a page’s loading speed, but we think you might know this already. Though there’s one thing you can’t control: the connection quality of your end user. Other than that, factors that influence your page speed include:
Your hosting service
Hosting services play a crucial role in the performance of your website because they provide the server where your site lives. So their server performance directly affects how your website performs. Factors influencing your host’s performance range from their server configurations, facilities, uptime, and specifications of machines running the servers. By choosing a good and reliable hosting, you ensure that your web server can process requests fast enough to accommodate all activities on your site. In addition, you’re eliminating one factor from the speed optimization equation.
Your website theme
Themes control the design of your website, from layouts and font to color scheme. But not all themes are created equally. Some themes are much cleaner and more optimized than others. They have a smaller file size, making them easier to load. That also means they have fewer bells and whistles (think of animation or specialized design patterns) compared to others that are a bit extra. But that’s a good trade-off if you want better loading performance.
Large file size
We’re talking about many types of files here, from your HTML file to CSS, and primarily JavaScript. Any bytes and kilobytes you can shave off these files will impact your page’s performance. In addition, modern sites use a lot of JavaScript to make the site dynamic. It’s what makes those flashy, cool animations and transitions you see on websites nowadays possible.
But JavaScript is also heavy, and overusing it makes a page clunky and difficult to load. You may have a low FID score in Core Web Vitals because processing these JavaScript files takes longer, especially on mobile devices, since their processing power isn’t as great as desktop computers.
Badly written code
Bad code can lead to many issues, from JavaScript errors to invalid HTML markups. Poorly-optimized code can cause significant dips in performance. Clean up your code, remove any errors, and eliminate any extra lines that do not add meaningful value.
Images and videos
Heavy images are the culprit of a slow-loading page. They take up a considerable chunk of your page’s weight (in kilobytes or megabytes). If your page has a large and unoptimized header image, you might have a low LCP score in Core Web Vitals. That’s because LCP measures how long it takes for the largest piece of content to appear on the screen, and your large image will surely take time to load. Image SEO plays a huge role in upping your site speed.
Too many plugins and widgets
If you’re running your site on WordPress, you’re undoubtedly using plugins and widgets to add functionalities to your site. Plugins are what makes WordPress such a powerful platform. But using too many plugins is counterintuitive because they slow your website down. Every plugin you install adds a bit of code to your page, making it heavier than it should be. Unoptimized plugins can also play a significant role in slowing down a website.
Absence of a CDN
CDN stands for content delivery network. It is an interconnected network of servers and their data centers distributed in various geographical locations. They can help with page loading performance, especially if you have an international audience.
A CDN saves your website’s static content, like CSS and image files, across various servers in the network. It does this so it can quickly serve these files to people who live close to one of the servers in the network. Let’s say your server is based in Australia, but you have many visitors from India. Instead of sending files directly from Australia, the CDN can send files from a server in India, making this process faster and more efficient.
Redirects
Redirects are a natural part of any website, and there’s nothing wrong with them. But keep in mind that redirects may impact your page’s loading performance if not configured properly. In most cases, they won’t significantly slow you down. But in the case of redirect chains, they will. By linking as close to the final destination as possible, you avoid creating too many redirects and thus, reduce your website’s load.
How to check if your page loads slowly
Unsurprisingly, some of the best resources for optimizing your website are from Google. We recommend that you explore their Web Fundamentals documentation to understand the techniques, tools, and approaches to building faster websites. Various tools are also available for measuring and monitoring the speed of your site. Here are a few that we recommend trying out:
Google PageSpeed Insights – A very powerful option that provides ‘real user metrics’ of your website, straight from Google. It’s also one of the most important tools you should know how to use.
The Page Experience report in Google Search Console – Don’t forget to check out this tool. It summarizes the user experience of visitors to your site, showing how many URLs pass or fail Core Web Vitals and other page experience signals.
Lighthouse, for Google Chrome – This is one of the most sophisticated performance measurement tools available and great for benchmarking.
WebPageTest – This tool provides a waterfall diagram of how all the assets load on your website. Great for spotting slow resources and bottlenecks.
Chrome Developer Console – This tool shows you exactly what’s happening as your site loads, on your computer and in your browser.
Optimize your site is more than looking at numbers
As you know by now, page speed is not only crucial for SEO but also for your sales, retention, and brand loyalty. Create great content, optimize your website and pages to meet Core Web Vitals’ standards, and aim for that top spot on the first page of Google.
It’s good to note that optimizing your site for page speed is not as simple as getting a good score in all those speed test tools. Don’t blind yourself to scores and metrics as those numbers are not representative of all your visitors. Every user is different. Every visitor uses another type of internet connection, device, and browser. Find out who your users are, how they access your site, and what they do while they’re there.
Combine tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, WebPageTest.org, and Lighthouse with analytical tools to get a broad overview of speed issues on your site. Use the recommendations to get started on improving your page speed, but do take these with a grain of salt. They are great starting points, but there is so much more you can do!
Page speed optimization resources for you
To get started with optimizing your page’s performance, check out these articles and documentation:
Jono is our Head of SEO, and part of our leadership team. He’s a digital strategist, marketing technologist, and full stack developer. He’s into technical SEO, emerging technologies, and brand strategy.
In this post, we’ll go into the basics of technical SEO. Now, discussing the basics of technical SEO might seem like a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, some basic knowledge about the more technical side of SEO can mean the difference between a high-ranking site and a site that doesn’t rank at all. Technical SEO isn’t easy, but we’ll explain – in layman’s language – which aspects you should (ask your developer to) pay attention to when working on the technical foundation of your website.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is all about improving the technical aspects of a website in order to increase the ranking of its pages in the search engines. Making a website faster, easier to crawl, and more understandable for search engines are the pillars of technical optimization. Technical SEO is part of on-page SEO, which focuses on improving elements on your website to get higher rankings. It’s the opposite of off-page SEO, which is about generating exposure for a website through other channels.
Why should you optimize your site technically?
Google and other search engines want to present their users with the best possible results for their queries. Therefore, Google’s robots crawl and evaluate web pages on a multitude of factors. Some factors are based on the user’s experience, like how fast a page loads. Other factors help search engine robots grasp what your pages are about. This is what, among others, structured data does. So, by improving technical aspects, you help search engines crawl and understand your site. If you do this well, you might be rewarded with higher rankings. Or even earn yourself some rich results!
It also works the other way around: if you make serious technical mistakes on your site, they can cost you. You wouldn’t be the first to block search engines entirely from crawling your site by accidentally adding a trailing slash in the wrong place in your robots.txt file.
But don’t think you should focus on the technical details of a website just to please search engines. A website should work well – be fast, clear, and easy to use – for your users in the first place. Fortunately, creating a strong technical foundation often coincides with a better experience for both users and search engines.
What are the characteristics of a technically optimized website?
A technically sound website is fast for users and easy to crawl for search engine robots. A proper technical setup helps search engines to understand what a site is about. It also prevents confusion caused by, for instance, duplicate content. Moreover, it doesn’t send visitors, nor search engines, to dead-ends caused by non-working links. Here, we’ll shortly go into some important characteristics of a technically optimized website.
1. It’s fast
Nowadays, web pages need to load fast. People are impatient and don’t want to wait for a page to open. In 2016 already, research showed that 53% of mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage doesn’t open within three seconds. And the trend hasn’t gone away – research from 2022 suggests ecommerce conversion rates drop by roughly 0.3% for every extra second it takes for a page to load. So if your website is slow, people get frustrated and move on to another website, and you’ll miss out on all that traffic.
Google knows slow web pages offer a less than optimal experience. Therefore they prefer web pages that load faster. So, a slow web page also ends up further down the search results than its faster equivalent, resulting in even less traffic. Since 2021, Page experience (how fast people experience a web page to be) has officially become a Google ranking factor. So having pages that load quickly enough is more important now than ever.
Search engines use robots to crawl, or spider, your website. The robots follow links to discover content on your site. A great internal linking structure will make sure that they’ll understand what the most important content on your site is.
But there are more ways to guide robots. You can, for instance, block them from crawling certain content if you don’t want them to go there. You can also let them crawl a page, but tell them not to show this page in the search results or not to follow the links on that page.
Robots.txt file
You can give robots directions on your site by using the robots.txt file. It’s a powerful tool, which should be handled carefully. As we mentioned in the beginning, a small mistake might prevent robots from crawling (important parts of) your site. Sometimes, people unintentionally block their site’s CSS and JS files in the robots.txt file. These files contain code that tells browsers what your site should look like and how it works. If those files are blocked, search engines can’t find out if your site works properly.
All in all, we recommend to really dive into robots.txt if you want to learn how it works. Or, perhaps even better, let a developer handle it for you!
The meta robots tag
The robots meta tag is a piece of code that you won’t see on the page as a visitor. It’s in the source code in the so-called head section of a page. Robots read this section when finding a page. In it, they’ll discover information about what they’ll find on the page or what they need to do with it.
If you want search engine robots to crawl a page, but to keep it out of the search results for some reason, you can tell them with the robots meta tag. With the robots meta tag, you can also instruct them to crawl a page, but not to follow the links on the page. With Yoast SEO it’s easy to noindex or nofollow a post or page. Learn for which pages you’d want to do that.
We’ve discussed that slow websites are frustrating. What might be even more annoying for visitors than a slow page, is landing on a page that doesn’t exist at all. If a link leads to a non-existing page on your site, people will encounter a 404 error page. There goes your carefully crafted user experience!
What’s more, search engines don’t like to find these error pages either. And, they tend to find even more dead links than visitors encounter because they follow every link they bump into, even if it’s hidden.
Unfortunately, most sites have (at least some) dead links, because a website is a continuous work in progress: people make things and break things. Fortunately, there are tools that can help you retrieve dead links on your site. Read about those tools and how to solve 404 errors.
To prevent unnecessary dead links, you should always redirect the URL of a page when you delete it or move it. Ideally, you’d redirect it to a page that replaces the old page. With Yoast SEO Premium, you can easily make redirects yourself. No need for a developer!
4. It doesn’t confuse search engines with duplicate content
If you have the same content on multiple pages of your site – or even on other sites – search engines might get confused. Because, if these pages show the same content, which one should they rank highest? As a result, they might give all pages with the same content a lower ranking.
Unfortunately, you might have duplicate content issues without even knowing it. Because of technical reasons, different URLs can show the same content. For a visitor, this doesn’t make any difference, but for a search engine it does; it’ll see the same content on a different URL.
Luckily, there’s a technical solution to this issue. With the so-called canonical link element, you can indicate what the original page – or the page you’d like to rank in the search engines – is. In Yoast SEO you can easily set a canonical URL for a page. And, to make it easy for you, Yoast SEO adds self-referencing canonical links to all your pages. This will help prevent duplicate content issues that you might not even be aware of.
5. It’s secure
A technically optimized website is a secure website. Making your website safe for users to guarantee their privacy is a basic requirement nowadays. There are many things you can do to make your (WordPress) website secure, and one of the most crucial things is implementing HTTPS.
HTTPS makes sure that nobody can intercept the data that’s sent over between the browser and the site. So, for instance, if people log in to your site, their credentials are safe. You’ll need something called an SSL certificate to implement HTTPS on your site. Google acknowledges the importance of security and therefore made HTTPS a ranking signal: secure websites rank higher than unsafe equivalents.
You can easily check if your website is HTTPS in most browsers. On the left-hand side of the search bar of your browser, you’ll see a lock if it’s safe. If you see the words “not secure” you (or your developer) have some work to do!
Structured data helps search engines better understand your website, content, or even your business. With structured data you can tell search engines what kind of product you sell, or which recipes you have on your site. Plus, it will give you the opportunity to provide all kinds of details about those products or recipes.
Implementing structured data can bring you more than just a better understanding by search engines. It also makes your content eligible for rich results; those shiny results with stars or details that stand out in the search results.
7. Plus: It has an XML sitemap
Simply put, an XML sitemap is a list of all pages of your site. It serves as a roadmap for search engines on your site. With it, you’ll make sure search engines won’t miss any important content on your site. The XML sitemap is often categorized in posts, pages, tags, or other custom post types, and includes the number of images and the last modified date for every page.
Ideally, a website doesn’t need an XML sitemap. If it has an internal linking structure that connects all content nicely, robots won’t need it. However, not all sites have a great structure, and having an XML sitemap won’t do any harm. So we’d always advise having an XML site map on your site.
8. Plus: International websites use hreflang
If your site targets more than one country or multiple countries where the same language is spoken, search engines need a little help to understand which countries or languages you’re trying to reach. If you help them, they can show people the right website for their area in the search results.
Hreflang tags help you do just that. You can use them to define which country and language each page is intended to serve. This also solves a possible duplicate content problem: even if your US and UK sites show the same content, Google will know they’re written for different regions.
Optimizing international websites is quite a specialism. If you’d like to learn how to make your international sites rank, we’d advise taking a look at our Multilingual SEO training.
Want to learn more about this?
So this is what technical SEO is, in a nutshell. It’s quite a lot already, while we’ve only scratched the surface here. There’s so much more to tell about the technical side of SEO!
Want to learn more? We have a great collection of SEO training courses in Yoast SEO academy, including Structured data for beginners. Plus we’ve just added a new Technical SEO training course covering Hosting and server configuration (for WordPress), and Crawlability and indexability.
Want to learn everything? Get Yoast SEO Premium and enjoy full access to all of our training courses!
There’s more! You can also take our technical SEO fitness quiz if you want to know how fit your site’s technical SEO is. This quiz helps you figure out what you need to work on and points you in the right direction to start improving your site.
There’s no getting around it – video files are big. So big, in fact, that they accounted for 81% of internet traffic in 2021. Videos loaded on any given web page will likely be the largest asset a browser will have to deal with. Unless you are doing something extremely unusual (and probably inadvisable) with Images JavaScript, that is.
This can lead some unseasoned web developers and SEOs to look at a waterfall chart from a site speed measuring tool and declare that “video is bad for site speed”. While this is not true in its broad application, there are certain best practices you need to be aware of. The right set up will ensure that video doesn’t slow your site down, and that your site doesn’t slow your video down.
Videos always look very bad for site speed on waterfall charts.
The goal is to ensure seamless video playback, without buffering, and blisteringly-fast load times with all assets across your website. In this endeavour, you should be keeping an eye on your core web vitals – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
The core web vitals and their acronyms
Tip 1: Serve your videos through a CDN
The simplest way to get videos on your WordPress website is to just upload one to your media library. After that you can include it within a page or post using the Gutenberg Video Block.
This is also probably the worst way to add videos. It’s a recipe for guaranteed buffering as soon as a user hits the play button. And that negatively affects First Input Delay (FID). Such a setup requires the browser to load up a full (non-optimized) video file directly from your server on click, with no fallbacks for server issues, user location, or poor connection speed.
Check out the Yoast guide to CDNs for full details on a better way of setting this up. Note that if you’re embedding videos from services like YouTube or Wistia, they manage the delivery of the video assets from their own network of CDNs.
Tip 2: Utilize adaptive streaming
The HTML5 <video> tag is an excellent and elegant piece of foundational piece of web technology. But on its own, it can cause problems. The tag simply loads up a video file in a default neutral video player and lets the browser do all of the work.
The problem here for site-speed is when you want to load a large or high-resolution video file. With a less-than-stellar connection, all that happens is a huge amount of buffering, while the browser attempts to load enough of the file to start playback. It’s very bad for FID.
The best way to deal with this problem is to utilize something called adaptive streaming. Adaptive streaming is when several different variations of a single video, all at different resolutions and bitrates, are made available to a server. The server then provides the best quality version of the video any given connection can handle. With adaptive streaming, if your user is on a mobile device on top of a remote hill and only working with a 500kbps connection, the server will provide an SD video with a bitrate of something like 300kbps, rather than the ideal 4K variation at 35mbps.
How can you do this? Well, you can set it up yourself using MPEG-DASH. Or move to a third-party video hosting platform like YouTube or Wistia; these use adaptive streaming as part of the video delivery tech stack.
Tip 3: Export video files with a variable bitrate
Another tip for improving playback speed is to reduce the video file(s) as much as possible during the export process. A Variable Bitrate (VBR) is a means of compression which adapts the bitrate of the video file based on the complexity of colors and movement at any given point in the video. The goal of this is keeping it as low as possible without noticeable degradation in quality. For instance, fast-moving action sequences with a lot of complex colors require a much higher bitrate. But a more static talking head shot over a simple background works fine with a lower bitrate. A VBR will allow your video compressor to intelligently make decisions about appropriate bitrates during export that will reduce the video filesize.
VBR can be used with the most common web video codecs, such as VP9 and h.264.
Tip 3: Avoid looping autoplaying videos (or at least keep them short and silent)
Autoplaying videos remain popular, particularly as backgrounds on home pages. But implemented poorly they can cause all manner of site-speed issues.
In my view, these are best avoided. They will almost always dramatically increase the time to Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). By forcing video playback at the same time as loading the core HTML, image and JavaScript elements of a page, you are requiring a browser to do a huge amount at once. It will do this sluggishly if the connection speed is poor.
If you must have looping autoplaying videos, keep them as short as possible (ideally less than 10 seconds). Also export the files with no audio, so as to keep the file size as small as possible.
Tip 4: Load video content asynchronously
There are two benefits of utilizing Asynchronous JavaScript in video delivery. Firstly, you can prevent videos from blocking the rendering of other elements of the page. And secondly, you can load the assets most critical to the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) before loading the big video file itself.
If you use AJAX to load your video player, once the client renders the core initial script (typically only a few hundred kilobytes), everything else can be loaded speedily in the background. Meanwhile the client renders the rest of the page elements. In addition, the video player frame and thumbnail – those elements which are visible in advance of a user clicking play – can be prioritized and loaded immediately, in order to positively impact the core web vitals.
This is precisely what the Yoast Video SEO for WordPress Plugin does to speed up video delivery, ensuring even the largest video files don’t negatively impact the user experience or search performance.
When implemented well, video won’t negatively impact your PageSpeed Insights score
Tip 5: Don’t put videos behind render-blocking JS
Sometimes scrollers or carousels contain videos, as an alternative to images.
Unfortunately, the plugins that operate these frequently end up loading each image upon a trigger. This can mean that other JavaScript blocks the video from loading. When this happens, the client needs to fully load all of the video assets when the video appears in the carousel, rather than having done some of the hard work before the user or crawler gets there.
This hampers site speed and First Input Delay, but not only that. It can also harm SEO, since Googlebot is unable to find and index the video.
Is your page not attracting the number of people you thought it would? Or are you wondering what you can improve to get your page higher up in the search results? And to get people to stay on (and come back to) your site? There are a few things you can do to give your page a better chance at performing well. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how you can determine which pages could use some extra love and what you can do to turn them into high-quality pages!
You may already be familiar with SEO and have a few pages that just don’t perform the way you would want them to. Or perhaps you’re not that experienced with SEO (what even is SEO?) and dread the thought of having to master it. In that case, we would like to assure you that it’s not that hard when you know the basics.
It is important to realize that SEO can have a huge impact on your business and online findability. Especially since Google announced their helpful content update, your rankings might suffer if you have too much low-quality content. It’s not just about using the right keyword a few times, search engines nowadays look at the whole picture. That’s why we’re such fanatic advocates of holistic SEO. Let’s discuss how to determine the quality of your pages and which ones you need to work on.
Quality content matters now more than ever!
Have you heard about Google’s helpful content update? From now on, the quality of your content could have an even bigger impact on your rankings.
We know that creating high-quality content isn’t easy. But our Premium SEO analysis can help! It’s just as smart as Google, helping you create rich and helpful content in a natural way and improving your rankings!
It’s important to determine which pages need improving and in what order. It can be tempting to just get started with the first page that comes to mind, but take some time to work out how your pages perform. This helps you prioritize and decide on what page needs your attention first.
Have a look at the metrics
You probably know your audience to some degree, but it’s unlikely that you know exactly what they want. Or how they search online and navigate through your site. Even if you have a hunch or hear from them regularly, make sure to look at the data to validate what people do on your site and where you can improve. A great tool to do this is Google Analytics.
Google Analytics gives you access to lots of data about your site. It can tell you how many people visit your site and where they’re coming from. But also, which pages are being visited most and how long people tend to stay on this page. All of this helps you determine the quality of your individual pages. Our guide on tracking your SEO with Google Analytics helps you understand this data and use it to determine where you can improve your page.
Use the Yoast SEO content analysis
Yoast SEO cleverly analyses your content to help you identify problems. Your content might have readability issues, making it hard for users to understand what you’re saying. Or you might have overused your keywords, making your text seem unnatural and spammy. Using Yoast SEO, you can easily see which pages and posts need improvement by looking out for red or orange bullets in the overview.
Yoast SEO shows red and orange bullets in the overview to highlight content issues
Be aware of duplicate content
When you maintain a site, especially a growing site, it can be tempting to use the same content on different pages. Don’t give in to this temptation! When the exact content can be found on different pages, you have a case of duplicate content. This will hurt your chances of ranking high in the search results. Google can even penalize you for having them.
A tool you can use to easily identify low-quality content is Screaming Frog SEO Spider. When you run a query for your website in the SEO spider, you will get a list of all the URLs on your site. Now scroll through that list and visit every URL that makes no sense to you. The thing is, low-quality pages often occur in groups, not as a single page.
Think along the line of old .html pages, where you end your URLs with a trailing slash now. Think about your attachment pages or anything with too many numbers in it. These should all make you feel suspicious. Visit the page, see if it shows low-quality content that shouldn’t be on Google. Test if these pages are indexed and see if there are more pages like them. Just go about it like that and you’ll find these low-quality pages in no-time. Take a critical look at the pages you’ve found.
Moz describes an even more in-depth analysis of low-quality pages in one of their Whiteboard Fridays, you might want to check as well.
When you’ve determined the quality of your individual pages, it’s a good idea to make a list in which you give priority to the pages you want to work on first. After that, the real fun begins. So let’s have a look at the first six suggestions we have to improve your page quality.
1. Decide on what you want to do with the page
Chances are that you resurfaced a few outdated pages or pages that don’t need to be shown in Google, even if you want to keep them on your site. The first step is to decide what you want to do with them. On the pages you want to keep, but don’t want to have shown in Google, you can use the noindex tag. If a low-quality page still holds relevant links to other parts of your website and has some traffic due to, for instance, links from other websites, you can use noindex, follow in your robots meta tag. This way, Google can find the page, follow the relevant links, but it will keep the page itself out of the search results.
You can find these indexing options in the Advanced tab in the Yoast SEO meta box
As for pages that are not up to date anymore, ask yourself the following question. Can you update the page by making a few changes to it? Great, then you can go to the second tip on this list. But for pages that no longer have any business being on your site anymore, it might be best to remove them.
Did you know that Yoast SEO Premium makes redirects super easy? No more unwanted 404s: easily create a redirect whenever you delete a post. Find out more about the redirect manager!
What to do with the URLs? If they still receive a decent amount of traffic, redirect them. To a similar page or post if possible, otherwise to a related category or tag page, and if all of that doesn’t fit, to your homepage. If there is little to no traffic, properly delete your page and let Google find the 404 or 410 error message. Your page will vanish from the search results and Google will be able to focus on relevant pages on your site instead.
2. Think about search intent
When you want to improve the quality of a page, it’s good practice to take search intent into consideration. Search intent (or user intent) is the term used to describe the purpose of an online search. To be more exact, it’s the reason why someone conducts a specific search. Over the years, Google has worked hard to improve its algorithm to be able to determine people’s search intent. That’s why you need to think about matching your content to someone’s search intent when they land on your page.
The reason we’re discussing this here is that you want to make sure your pages show up for the right search intents. When someone is looking for information, you don’t want to send them to your product page right away. They’re probably not ready for that yet. And when someone does have a transactional intent, you don’t want them to land on one of your blog posts discussing the latest news. You want to make sure they go to the right product (or category) page right away.
An important factor that determines the quality of your page is content. There are a few basics that you need to tackle right away. For one, always base your content on the right keyphrases by conducting keyword research. Also, if your low-quality page doesn’t have a lot of text and doesn’t hold a lot of information, this could be considered thin content. Your users and search engines aren’t fans of this type of content, as it has little or no value to them. This is also the case with duplicate content, as we discussed earlier. So make sure to write extensively on the topic you want to be found on.
Optimizing existing content?
Use the Duplicate Post plugin to copy an existing post or page to your drafts. This enables you to edit your content without it being published right away. That way you can take your time on improving this content.
When you’re happy with your revised content, you can copy this to your existing page or post and simply click update. Your post or page is ready to start ranking well, with just one revision!
Try to be critical of your writing and become the source for people instead of copying another source. Although it’s always good to keep an eye on your competition and the content they’re putting out there, make sure to have your own voice. If you write unique, insightful, useful content, people will be much more inclined to actually read it and even share your content on social media or link to it. Google will see that content as an addition to its index.
We don’t want to change the way you communicate with your audience. It’s what makes you unique. The readability analysis in our Yoast SEO plugin can help you tweak a few things to create an easy to read text everyone will love. The Premium version of the plugin comes with even more tools, and access to our SEO Copywriting training, if you want to brush up on your writing skills. When it comes to writing great content, Google also gave us a kind of checklist in 2011 that’s worth checking out. Most of what’s in there is still relevant ten years later.
4. Show expertise and trustworthiness
Everyone can own a website nowadays. Which is great, as this opens up the web for everyone. But this online growth has also resulted in trust issues when it comes to sites you’re not familiar with yet. That’s why it’s so important to show readers, and search engines, that you can be trusted and that you’re an authority in your field. This doesn’t just help your pages show up in the search results, it also helps users reach the level of trust they need to do business with you online.
Show your trustworthiness and expertise through your site and the content on your site. You can do so by using testimonials, being open about your business, security seals, and writing lots of content that shows your expertise. All of these will improve the quality of your pages, while also helping you build a strong brand online.
5. Work on your site reputation
Another factor that is closely related to trustworthiness is the reputation of your site. This is something search engines also take into account when determining the quality of the pages on your site. But how do they determine your reputation? By analyzing what others are saying about you online. For example, user ratings about your site and how positive these are. But also other experts or established sites mentioning your business on their site. Or any other information about your business or authors mentioned on other sites.
6. Link to and from your page
For people and search engines to be able to find your page, you need to make sure to link to it. From other pages on your site that are related to the one you’re currently working on. So make sure to work on your internal linking and connect the content on your site to each other.
That being said, it’s important to not go overboard and link to every page you own in one post. Always keep the user in mind. So make sure to link to pages or posts that are actually relevant and that you can link naturally to. Our plugin has a great internal linking tool that suggests related content for every post or page.
Tips to improve site performance
We still have 4 tips to go, and they’re all related to the performance of your site. Some of them may take some more time, but these aspects are essential if you want to improve the quality of your pages and site. Not just for the search engines, but especially for your users.
7. Improve your site’s speed
The speed of your website determines whether you get a good ranking in Google, and its importance keeps growing. Why? Because faster sites are easier for search engines to process. And because search engines know that users don’t like slow websites. Users tend to buy less from slower sites and don’t read and engage as much as they would do on a site with great site speed. So work on improving your site speed, you’ll be thankful for it later. Google also announced that their new ranking factor page experience will roll out in May 2021, making speed and user experience on your site even more important.
8. Consider user experience
User experience, also called UX, is all about how users experience a site or product. So why should UX be part of your SEO strategy? Search engines want to provide their users with the best result for their question or search query. The best result doesn’t only mean the best answer, it also means the best experience. So even if you’ve written an excellent answer in a post, but your site is slow or a mess, Google won’t consider your post the best answer.
Think about the goal of your site and specific pages. What do you want visitors to do on your page? Buy stuff? Read your articles? Your design and content should support this goal. Having a clear goal in mind will also help you prioritize the improvements for your site. This ties in with the search intent of a certain page, but you should also consider whether the design and structure of your pages support the goal of your site. And how does your site work on mobile devices?
9. Don’t forget about accessibility
The last question mentions your mobile site, and with good reason. Mobile is such a big part of most people’s life nowadays, that you don’t have the luxury of not having a well-performing mobile site. Make sure your site work on different devices and in different browsers to cater to every one of your site visitors. We have an ultimate guide on Mobile SEO that helps you determine the state of your mobile site, and what you can still improve on.
10. Keep your site healthy and safe
The safety and health of your site is important for the visibility of your site, but it’s also important for you and your business. So make sure to check how safe your site is right now and make the necessary improvements to keep your site happy and healthy. If you’re using WordPress, we have blog posts that help you with your site’s health and your security in a few easy steps.
Time to improve that page quality!
All of these tips will help you improve the quality of your pages. And give Google a website that truly helps their visitors, and in the end, simply answers their question. As soon as you have cleaned up all that low-quality content and all high-quality pages surface in Google, you know you’ve made yet another sustainable step towards better rankings. Have fun!
