A website’s speed and its loading time are essential for a visitor that arrives to said website through a search engine. Speed is a parameter that can influence your SEO.
Google itself says it: “A site that appears in a search result with a slow loading time in comparison to other sites that have a longer loading time, can be promoted. Conversely, sites with slower loading time can me demoted.” Here are 5 SEO tips to improve the speed of your site and get a Google “promotion.”
Optimize your database
Most sites use databases to store information. The weight of these can affect the speed of your pages. Adding an index is one of the best ways to find information more quickly. Some very long loading times, greater to 5 or 10 seconds, can be reduced to 1 or 2 seconds with a well-constructed index.
Clean up your code
You do not need five traffic analysis programs, or heavy codes for integrated videos, social widgets, etc… Remember that simplicity is key. Each time that you add another tracking code to your page, embedded videos, or any other element that requires a separate loading (such as iFrames), make your page heavy. The same goes for action buttons. Most sharing buttons are based on JavaScript and generate iFrame on the page. Use them with caution.
Use caching whenever possible
When you visit a website for the first time, your browser must request all the images, texts, and scripts from the site server. They are stocked in your browser’s cache such that when you visit other pages on the site, it will suffice to download the parts that are unique, but not the entire site. Local storage allows you to store megabytes of data using your visitors’ browser. The use of caching has two major advantages:
- Improving speed: the visitor accesses resources from his local computer and does not have to wait for the server to deliver all the content
- Savings: Since you increase your use of local storage, the use of your server will reduce. This means that you will pay for less bandwidth and less use of the server. Opt for a content deliver network (CDN).
Imagine that your website’s server is physically located in the Paris region. Your site will load quicker for locals because data have a shorter distance to travel from the server to the user. Now imagine a user that wants to visit your site from the United States. The data must travel across the Atlantic. Each image, each video, each JavaScript file, all CSS files, must travel. Wouldn’t it be great if a copy of the page could exist in a server in Paris and in the United States, both at once? That is exactly what a content deliver network (CDN) does.
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