“You would think with the higher bandwidth speeds we have access to page speed would not be an issue, but many search engines will give you better placement in their rankings if your page loads quicker than others.”
frank deardurff
One thing that I’ve discovered from being online for over twenty years is that you have to stay in the game. You cannot become complacent with your website. Technology changes and so should your website.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of those “things” you need to keep up to date with. While some of the strategies stay the same, other items such as page speed have changed over the years.
Why Does Page Speed Matter?
I want to explain how to improve page speed, why it matters and the tools I’ve used to get the A+ ranking that everyone is searching for.
You would think with the higher bandwidth speeds we have access to page speed would not be an issue, but many search engines will give you better placement in their rankings if your page loads quicker than others.
Obviously, there are other factors to getting good SEO listings, but page speed is known to be one of them and that is my focus in this article.
Earlier in the year I noticed that my page rankings had slipped from where they once were so I started looking at why.
My first step was to optimize my images by utilizing a plugin to reduce image size because those images will affect page speed. I went with the Short Pixel plugin. I’ve also been told the EWWW Image Optimizer is good, as well.
The second step I did was to change the themes. While that probably didn’t have any effect on page speed, I noticed the previous themes code wasn’t as clean when viewing the page source.
From there, I went to one of the tools I’ve used over the years GTmetrix.com to test page speed. In the first scan I failed. I had an F grade in several places. I will admit, it had been a year or so since I had tested my website with that tool and things have changed on what is being tested.
What Page Speed Tools Did I Use?
Instead of talking about page caching, JavaScript loading, and deferring CSS, I want to save you time so that you can increase your page speed. Here are the tools I used to receive the A+ rating we’re all looking for.
They are all plugins that can be added from the back end of your website by searching for them in the add plugin section.
- Autoptimize
- CSS JS Manager, Async JavaScript, Defer Render Blocking CSS
- Leverage Browser Caching
- WP Performance Score Booster
- Short Pixel Image Optimizer or EWWW Image Optimizer
While I’m not one to add a bunch of plug-ins to my website, I felt this was the easiest way to achieve the goal I needed to reach—increase my page speed. There are ways to do some of these steps without a plugin if you are proficient with htaccess and have time to compress the images yourself along with other code manipulation.
I’d love to hear your results. Go ahead and leave a comment on my blog at FrankDeardurff.com or leave a note in the Marketing University Discussion if you are a Platinum or Titanium member. www.marketinguniversity.com
