There’s a common misconception that Sitespeed is a huge ranking factor on Google, but this is not directly the case. So why is it important at all?
You’ll want to ensure your Sitespeed is well optimised because it affects the overall user experience of your website, and we all know nobody wants to wait forever for a website to load. When it comes down to how Google ranks websites, the user comes first, so providing bad user experience in this way will negatively affect your rankings.
Knowing which devices your users are accessing your website through the most can also be very beneficial because it’ll help you optimize the website accordingly. What works well for one device may not always work well for another. These are all factors that an SEO specialist would need to consider and look into to ensure that a website ranks on Google.
The Challenge
Distil Digital’s Sitespeed was noticeably slow. Once we took a look at the issues that were that causing this, we discovered a multitude of contributing factors, and set out a few swift actions to be taken as part of our Sitespeed Optimisation approach:
- Update PHP version on site
- Update JQuery version
- Plugin updated required
- WordPress Version
- Set up server page caching
- Set up CDN
- Compress all images
- Javascript needed to be minified
- CSS needed to be minified
- Optimise HTML code
- Enable Image Lazy Load (page loads all images before the user can begin to scroll)
- Combine Webfonts.js asynchronously
- Enable Lazy Load on content and Widgets (page first loads all content before becoming responsive)
The Solution
By making use of various plugins such as Jetpack Accelerator, W3 Total Cache, and JQuery Updater, we could solve the issues that were causing the website’s Sitespeed to be slowed.
We ensured that CSS and JavaScript were optimised. Page caching was implemented on the site server in order to deliver saved pages to the user much faster. We implemented image compression, and Lazy Load functionality so images and content loads as the user scrolls, this reduces load times and server resource load.
The PHP version was updated and we ensured that we were running up to date JavaScript to further speed up the site’s performance. We also performed minification of HTML, JavaScript and CSS code for overall faster site processing and delivery.
