What’s The Rush?

Website Search Engine Optimization and Site Speed

Optimization
Having a fast website is essential nowadays, if your website search engine optimization is bad, it means that users will get frustrated using your website and that could easily deter them from using it in the future. Luckily, ensuring that your search engine is fast and sleek, means improving other parts of your website and so the overall speed and responsiveness of the website will increase.

Infrastructure
Though websites are not physical objects, many people forget that websites need to be stored somewhere on a physical server and, sadly, not all servers are created equal. Using a server with good infrastructure is crucial to a fast website. It is important that you use a server provider that has good connectivity such as a 1 Gb/s line and servers with solid-state drives. Both of these aspects will increase speed massively and help support the load, if there is a surge in traffic. It is also preferably that your provider has servers in different locations around the globe, which will decrease the average latency experienced by the user.

If you do not have the expertise or time to handle your servers, you can look into managed hosting. Though it comes with a price, managed hosting can speed up your website, simply because they will have the expertise, that you don’t, to optimize the server side for you.

Content
Although website search engine optimization relies on the efficiency of the infrastructure it uses, that’s not the whole story. A server can only process so much data per second, so if you want a fast search engine, you need to either up the speed of your server or decrease the amount of data needed. The latter is orders of magnitude cheaper to do and it is something you can without too much of a hassle.

Majority of the space on websites is taken up by media, specifically images. So, decreasing the size of your images can radically speed up your search, by giving it less to find and load. This can be done by using techniques such as lossless compression, which decreases the size of the image without compromising the quality. You can also use a different format such as WebP which uses less space than either PNG or JPEG.

Another thing that slows down searching is the amount of HTTP requests the website has to make. Each request means time is getting wasted on latency, because your server needs to contact other servers, maybe on the other side of the world. By storing more content locally and minimizing the number of plugins and HTTP referrals on the website, you decrease the amount of times you need to make requests, thus saving you time.

Knowing your software
Many of the issues stated above are common issues found all over the web and so website hosting platforms normally have ways to combat them. By doing some digging in your settings, especially if you are using big commercial services such as WordPress, you will find other options for increasing website responsiveness, such as optimizing font, minifying your CSS and Javascript or hotlink protection. Increasing website speed is just a matter of finding those small tweaks and tricks.