Improving Page Load Speed for SEO
As you may have noticed, we’ve been a little silent on the blog over the past few weeks! Did you miss us?
We have been hard at work upgrading our WordPress hosting infrastructure and making our sites better! Making this change protects our WordPress-hosted sites against hacker attacks, improves page load speed and provides backup and restore functionality. Our new server platform emphasizes security, putting firewalls between your data and any threats while being proactive about detecting and eliminating malware.
While we predominantly work with the BigCommerce platform, WordPress offers a different and robust set of tools for sites that are more active with the blogging aspect of their business. A flexible environment, WordPress has many plugins and options available to tailor the user experience, and with such high platform adoption worldwide, they’ve made it very easy to proactively pursue managed SEO goals.
Making this change will allow us to focus on what we do best – serving you as our customer and colleague!
Here’s just a short list of the improvements we’ve instituted:
- Secure file management
- Built-in content delivery network (CDN) for faster-loading content
- Enhanced security
- Better backup and and easier restoration process
- A true staging environment for better version control and continued site development
- Your site will run four to six times faster
- Improved exploit protection
- Automatic WordPress and plugin version updates
- DDoS and brute force attack protection
Sites with enhanced security are faster, since bogus requests don’t eat up valuable resources. Faster sites rank better!
Reduce Bounce Rate with a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A content delivery network (CDN) is a system of separated servers that allow your content to be delivered to the client via their closest geographical server. What does this mean for page load speed?
Think of it like online shopping: if you live right down the street from Company A’s delivery center, you’re going to get your packages WAY faster from Company A than you will from Company B, who has just one shipping location across the country. You’d get frustrating having to wait for Company B, wouldn’t you? Using a CDN allows your users to load your site more quickly, reducing the likelihood of them getting frustrated and leaving for a faster site.
Optimizing Content for Speed and SEO
PageSpeed and YSlow are generally regarded as solid metrics of a website’s usability and speed, along with more easily quantifiable statistics like page load speed and page requests. Page load speed is one of the most underrated and yet most important usability metrics when it comes to whether your users stay or go. Looking at the post-migration results below from analytics site GTMetrix, you can see that our new servers and their content-delivery network (CDN) make sites lightning-quick.
Here are the performance metrics for one site that we are in the process of migrating to our new servers:
As you can see, they had a large number of requests on the homepage and a glacially slow page load time. IntuitSolutions optimized their pages, migrated their site to a new server, and activated a CDN for their content. Their soon-to-be-published new site is performing outstandingly better! See for yourself:
Their page load time is miniscule, and with far fewer page requests. Our page optimizations gave them a great PageSpeed score and a perfect YSlow score!
Better Google Organic Rankings with HTTPS
For all of our managed SEO clients, we installed an SSL certificate to secure their site with HTTPS protocol.
An SSL certificate keeps your site in compliance with Google recommendations and is one of the best ways to show that your website is serious about safety. Last year, Google called for “HTTPS everywhere” on the web, allowing time for sites to get properly adopted. We even wrote about it last year as well!
As you may have noticed, Google is very guarded about their ranking algorithms, and they’ve flat-out divulged that moving to HTTPS protocol could give you a ranking boost taking into consideration all other factors. It’s an SEO no-brainier when Google is telling you that this will help you site rank better!
If you are not one of our managed service clients, this is the perfect time to move to HTTPS protocol with your own SSL certificate that we will issue and install.
Organic traffic, HTTPS protocol, and PPC are all pieces of the SEO puzzle. We can help you put them all together to work for your site. Contact us today to start the conversation about powering up your WordPress site with us!
