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Stay on Top of Your Website Speed

Great SEO management takes updating, and that usually means often! The great thing is that there are lots of tools out there to help you keep your web pages optimized. You can optimize for a lot of things, but one of the most important things to do is optimize for speed.

Fast pages rank better with Google, but they are also more usable. On average, pages in the United States take somewhere around 9 to eleven seconds to load across major industries. A very few are in the eight or 12 second range.

Get Your Site Tested

Before you decide which page to optimize first, get your site tested. There’s a lot of great software out there. Just take your pick and get started! Pingdom is an easy one to use that will check per page for you. It’s the best option for people who update their pages frequently.

Check Your Code

One of the major ways sites become slow is with cumbersome code. Usually, the culprit is either clunky JavaScript or redundant CSS.

Some basic things you can do with your developer are to lighten up the JavaScript and to resize images with CSS so that they easily fit your page width.

All in all, you want the JavaScript to be as lean as possible. This may mean having some interactive features revisited. It can also mean checking up on your animation to see if it’s really necessary.

After that, you want the CSS, or cascading style sheets, to be well-organized and very neat. It may seem obsessive when you see how neat people try to make their style sheets, but neatness makes all the difference in the world when it comes to page load times.

Fixe 404s

These little guys are the enemy of page speed. Fix them pronto to boost your rankings! There’s not much to it: simply delete empty URLs, or issue a 301 redirect to another page on your site.

Cache Your Page

This is an easy thing you can do no matter how large your website is. It will cause your page to be saved when people load it.

Use Accelerated Mobile Pages

These are pared-down versions of your page that load on mobile. You can use a WordPress plugin if you don’t have a developer to fix you up with AMPs.

Use Minification

This is a surefire way to make the page load faster. Essentially, minification means to strip data from the browser that you don’t need. It strips unnecessary and redundant data to help the page load smoother.

Check Your Plugins

Minimizing is the goal here. You clean out plugins just like you clean out a closet! Take a hard line and delete any that you don’t really need, because they will all slow your site down at least a little bit.

These things may seem small, but they have a huge impact on page speed. Remember that pages load differently on different devices. Get your website tested across browsers and devices to get an accurate picture of how the pages are loading. If you stick to it and optimize a little every week, you won’t have to do huge yearly overhauls.

Overall, the key is to keep it lean on the website. Lean code, clean browsers, and light plugins are the way to go. If you have a really hard time getting the page load time down, you will want to check on getting a different host. But usually, the biggest thing is cleaning up JavaScript and CSS. After that, it depends on what you have on your website and if it’s mobile-ready.