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There are many ways you can improve the performance of a website from an SEO perspective. When it comes to link building, which of the following statements is accurate?
- The quantity of links is important, not the quality.
- The quality of links is important, not the quantity.
- Links hidden within code on sites improve your SEO performance.
- Links are hidden within images on sites to improve your SEO performance.
This is a question you may get asked in an SEO job interview or at the end of an SEO course like the Google Digital Garage Digital Marketing Course.
The important thing is that you know the different ways you can improve the performance of a website that you can apply to any page you’re working on.
In this article, you’ll find out some other unique ways to improve the performance of a website with a primary focus on SEO so you can get more traffic to your page and improve your page impressions.
What Does Improving The Performance Of A Website Mean?
Website optimization or improving website performance entails the optimization of various elements on a web page or blog so it can load faster and improves its chance of discovery.
It includes the optimization of various elements on a page like images, links, files, etc.
Why Is This Important?
There are several reasons why improving the performance of your website is important. SEO wouldn’t be so great in marketing if it wasn’t generating good results.
Some of the reasons why improving the performance of a website are important are as follows.
- Improves user experience (UX)
A page that loads quickly, with fast loading and clear images, fully optimized content, and so on would make your visitor’s experience on your page better.
Pages that don’t load fast enough are quick to frustrate visitors and they might just leave and never show up again.
- Improved mobile experience
Most websites are now being designed with mobile users in mind. The reason for this is very clear. A higher percentage of web traffic is now being gotten from mobiles. It’s best to make mobile-first designs to keep your pages optimized for mobile users.
Improving the performance of a website also involves optimizing for mobile users and thus, your page would be getting a lot more traffic than if it were only designed for desktop users.
- Visitor retention
Pages that load faster and have optimized images and links have lower bounce rates. To retain first-time visitors to your page, you should know how to improve the performance of a website.
- It’s a crucial step in SEO
In SEO, improved performance on a website is one of the important ranking factors. It impacts your traffic, conversion, and sales. Also, since it improves visitor retention, search engines would read that your page is offering valuable information and may thus rank your page higher on SERPs.
How To Improve The Performance Of A Website
There are certain ways you can improve the performance of a website. Some of them work better and faster than others.
The most popular ways would be discussed further on in this article.
Optimize Links On Your Page
Optimizing links is one of the easiest strategies you can use to improve the performance of a website.
You have to optimize both your internal and external links to make the process complete.
To optimize links generally, using keyword-rich anchor texts for them creates a better chance of them getting clicked. An anchor text is the visible text of a link.
For instance, writing www.personarise.com is not as descriptive as the SEO Specialist Certification Course.
They lead to the same page but one offers more information as to what search engines or people would find when they click on the link. It is more advisable to make use of the second option to keep your page more optimized.
For external links, as you have seen at the beginning of this article, the quality of the links you’re using is way more important than the quantity.
External links are split into two and they are inbound links and outbound links.
Inbound links are from pages that are linking back to your domain from theirs. These are also referred to as “backlinks”.
Outbound links are created when you link to other domains from your own domain. It’s like the direct opposite of inbound links.
Having external links on your page is a very great way to improve its performance on SERPs. They tell search engines your niche, and the relevancy of your page to the topic, and they improve the overall domain authority.
Don’t clutter your page with too many useless links that you just found somewhere. Make sure those links actually lead to pages with high domain authority and are actually relevant to the topic of your article.
Optimize Images And Videos
People find images appealing on a website and they sometimes give a visual representation of the directions being given in the post.
However, when those images load slowly or are too big or small for their device, they’ll find it annoying. It’ll look like a bunch of white space within your content. Visitors would not want to stay on a page like that.
For this reason, make sure your pictures aren’t too heavy and load faster. They should also be resizable to fit any screen that it is displayed on.
Also, give your visitors the discretion to choose whether they want to watch a video on your page or not. Videos that autoplay would make your page load speed slower and can also annoy your visitors.
Improving the load speed of images and videos is one of the important ways to improve website performance.
Reducing Page Weight
The weight of a page is determined by the overall size of a webpage including all the resources featured on the page like code files, embeds, images, etc.
The larger the files on your page are, the harder it would be to render them.
Most of the code on the front end of websites is written to create beautiful and dynamic views that’ll make your visitors go “Wow!”. But what’s the use of all that when it takes visitors more than 7 seconds to reach the information they actually came to your page for?
With every new element you add, every break tag, or image, your page is getting slower. You can remove unnecessary parts of your code or content. You should favor clean layouts and reduce complexity to get better website performance.
Avoid Plugins As Much As You Can
Plugins are mostly used to help process some types of web content like Java. However, plugins are not supported on mobile devices. We’re supposed to be creating mobile-first designs right?
Plugins cause crashes and sudden hangups on mobile devices and would really slow down website performance, especially on mobile.
Instead, employ the use of native web technologies that you’re entirely sure work on both desktop and mobile devices.
Reduce Redirects And Only Use Them Where Necessary
Redirects slow down the use of a page. Why should I always have to wait for 30 seconds to get redirected to another page just because I want one little question answered?
They’re usually done using 301 and 302 status codes and they basically send users from the page they requested to another one.
Having unnecessary redirects slows down the performance of a website greatly. Your visitors might just dump your page and go to another.
Reduce HTTP Requests
One of the most important ways to improve the performance of a website is to reduce the number of HTTP requests that have to be carried out.
An HTTP is the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. In every browser, for a website to load, the browser would send an HTTP request to the hosting server of that website. The web server would then return a response containing the requested resource and the page would be rendered. This sometimes slows down the performance of a website.
Imagine you have embedded several external links, images, widgets, icons, ads, or external font packs into that one page you’re trying to load.
The web browser would have to send additional requests to all these servers and it would take a longer time to load the resources on your page.
Try as much as possible to reduce the number of HTTP requests a browser has to make to load your page. Improving website performance is highly dependent on this factor.
Also, including separate CSS files in one stylesheet at the head of your HTML document is beneficial to improving the performance of a website. Your javascript, fonts, and other resources should also be done in this same way.
When you do this, your HTML would download at the same time as all the external links making the page load speed way faster.
Conclusion
To conclude, it is important to note that all websites are designed differently to suit the industry they’re meant for. One common feature of the highest-performing brands is that they have taken their time to improve the performance of their website.
I hope you have learned the important ways you can improve the performance of a website in this article and I hope you find them useful on your own website.
If you want to check out how fast your page loads currently, you check out PageSpeed Insights by Google or Pingdom.