In this article I will share with you some SEO tips for those of you who are using WordPress as their content management system. For visual learners I have created a quick video tutorial that will walk you through the steps in this article.
SEO is a very broad topic and no one knows for sure exactly all the factors that contribute to Google's ranking algorithm. One thing for certain that will affect your Google ranking is your page load speed. I am going to share with you a couple of quick tips that you can implement in minutes that will give you a boost in your Google rankings.
The video above is a quick walk through for visual learners.
One of the many factors that Google looks at is how long it takes for your website to load. If you are not sure how fast or slow your page load time is, you can test the load speed of your website over at GT Metrix. In the image below you can see that I was able to cut my website page load time in half just by adding a few simple free WordPress plugins.
The page speed score from my site increased from 50 percent to 98 percent and the page load time was cut in half from 1.8 seconds to 0.9 seconds. Having a fast page load time isn’t only relevant to Google but to your webpage viewers as well. If it takes too long for your page to load then your web visitors are going to move on to another site.
Here are four free WordPress plugins to speed up your page loading time:
Refer to the video tutorial above for the setup configurations of each plugin.
Another contributing factor that Google looks at is whether or not your website is mobile friendly. Google has a page set up that will help you to determine if your web page is mobile friendly. Run your website URL through the Google Mobile Friendly test and you'll know how the big G looks at your site.
Hopefully you found these SEO tips helpful and I look forward to sharing some more SEO tips with you in future articles.
Thanks for that Craig! I use wordpress for like 4 websites. I got good scores on GT Metrix without the above add-ons except for one site oddly since I use all the same themes too lol...
You are welcome Chris.
For media heavy sites I recommend the following:
W3TotalCache, it's not the easiest to set up or optimise but once dialled in gives the best performance.
Combine W3TC with a CDN - that way your content will load quicker regardless of where the visitor is, and also reduces the load on your server.
Yoast tools such as Google Analytics and Yoast SEO - these will help you dial in your settings and configure the GA tool. This will help you understand the workflow for optimising your site for engines.
Consider using CloudFlare or WordFence to help lockdown your WP install from the bots. Not 100% but combining this with Akismet can be beneficial. WordFence is interesting as it can also act as a cache system.
Disable all fonts, or learn to optimise them. Many of the font libraries are still using the old fall back system which can increase load time by 200% in some cases. Font along with bloated JS libraries are the two biggest time hogs out-with media.
https://viget.com/extend/the-font-face-dilemma
Not SEO related - enable two-factor authentication to reduce back load time from bots trying to logging into the site. This is important as WP does a full system reload each time the page loads which can drag your server down.
If speed is important then consider WP specific hosting such as that from Media Temple or more focussed companies.
Finally don't become laser focused on Google there are other engines to consider, Bing and DuckDuckGo both of which are getting upticks in traffic especially Bing due to it's integration into Cortana and Windows 10.
Really helpful. W3 Total Cache and WP-Optimize cut my load time down a lot. Autoptimize didn't mesh with my site, it actually increased the load time, quite noticeably. I'd like to try EWWW Optimizer, because I know my images are likely slowing my site down, but I'm gun-shy of the quality loss. Thanks!
Great info. Thank you for sharing Craig! I went from a page speed score of 84% and YSlow score of 74% to a 91% and 84%. Great tips, thanks again!!
You are welcome Kyle.
Thanks for this, I really appreciate help for plugins. SEO is a minefield so 'every little helps'.
No problem Patrick.
Craig, any tips the query string front? I got a big fat F!
But apart from that, I scored 90+ thanks to W3 Total Cache and CDN =)
While I appreciate these posts and find them very informative, unfortunately the plugins listed (2 of which I was already running) only increased my speed by 3%. Nothing else changed. AutoOptimizer also slowed my load time down :-(
This is my issue also! Did you make any changes to help speed the load time back up out of curiosity?
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Really great article ! That was really simple and efficient. Thank you so much Craig :)
Hi Craig! I came across this article while doing a search on how to improve my SEO. I discovered through GT Metrix that my blog sites load time was surprisingly slow. I installed the plugins you recommended and my page speed score is now an A but my page load time is even slower now 5.4 seconds! ! ! ! I'm not sure why. :-(