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Ultimate SEO Checklist – Performance

By: Author Alex Lim

Posted on  - Last updated:

Categories SEO

This part of the guide focuses more on the technical aspects of SEO to have a high-performance website that loads quickly and has no delays. Why is this important? It is important as performance is not only a ranking factor, it is also an essential factor when it comes to user experience: If a site takes too long to load people will simply close it and go to the next site. Subsequently, you will find a couple of tips on how to make sure your page is working well from a technical perspective!

Choose your Web Host wisely

One of the first decisions you will have to make is to choose the web host you want your site to run on. Choosing the right platform is essential for your SEO success as it impacts a series of SEO dimensions, including page speed, bounce rate, and the overall UX experience.

In the past few years, the clear trend was to go with the big players in the market including Bluehost or GoDaddy. However, these big companies have a rather hard time providing solutions for all different needs and niches out there.

Hence, it is not surprising that now so-called boutique web hosts have conquered the market. Boutique web hosts are focused on providing a web host solution tailored to the needs and requirements of a specific niche, offering you both the server and the platform to set up your website.

Using one of these providers (depending on your industry) is a great choice that you should look into these days: They are novel, offer state-of-the-art technology, and usually come with great customer support.

Some recommendations:

Check The Server is Located Close to Your Service Area

Here’s a quick hack on how to make the website of your local business faster.

If you for example operate a local business in the San Francisco area, it would make sense to sign up with Cloudways, pick a DigitalOcean or Vultr server, choose San Francisco as server location and there you have it! Now, when somebody visits your website, it will load super fast because there is no lengthy back and forth DNS change required beforehand!

While this approach works great for local businesses, it obviously gets a lot more complicated once your service offer reaches nationwide or even global audiences. In this case: Let me introduce CDNs.

Use a CDN

CDN is a shortcut and stands for Content Delivery Network. According to Yoast, a CDN is “a network of servers in different geographic locations working together to get content to load faster by serving it from a location near the visitor.”

Hence, this is your solution if you provide your service nationwide or even globally.

However, a CDN offers more than just hosting your static files on servers.

Here’s a quick overview of what CDN can do for you:

  • deliver static content to users in a fast and efficient way
  • save you bandwidth
  • support you with scale resources in case you go viral!
  • add a new level of security

Here are some recommended CDNs

Check for Gzip Compression

Gzip is a method of compressing aka shrinking your files which enables faster network transfers. Due to the smaller size, your content loads faster when someone accesses your site. Even though gzip compression is standard practice these days, there are still some hosts which do not offer this feature by default. So make sure to check if it’s enabled.

You can easily test for Gzip compression by checking out one of the following two apps:

In case the result is that you don’t have Gzip compression enabled, simply reach out to your web host to activate it. If that’s not possible it might be time to switch to a new web host.

Check for HTTP/2

What is HTTP? HTTP is the network protocol that is the negotiation base for the exchange of all network information exchange between the user and your site/server. It’s basically the channel that enables users to load websites.

There are two different versions of HTTP: The later version, HTTP/2 is basically a revision of HTTP/1 with major performance improvements. Your goal should be to have your server run on HTTP/2: The update is a fundamental makeover with a difference of 18 years in between the releases. The most advanced feature of HTTP/2 is that it can send several data requests over a single TCP connection at the same time. This allows you to download web files from a server via ASync mode.

Here are two tools that let you test if your website supports HTTP/2:

If the result is that your website doesn’t support HTTP/2, reach out to your web hosting provider. If your provider can’t enable this feature for you, it’s time to switch hosts.

The latest update, HTTP/3, is scheduled to be launched later this year so keep an eye out!

Use a Caching Solution

Caching is the process in which the server stores the website data as static in memory, to be served faster. Hence, since it increases the page loading speed, it also increases the user experience.

There are different types of caching out there:

  • server-side cache
  • database cache
  • object cache
  • page cache
  • CDN cache

Each type stores the data on different levels.

Having a caching solution in place should be standard for every website. Luckily, there are many solutions available that enable caching, especially for WordPress.

Many web hosting providers have already come up with their own caching solutions built around their existing infrastructure. Examples are SG Optimizer by Siteground or Breeze by Cloudways. These solutions are free to use especially when you are hosting your websites with the respective providers.

Among the premium plugins available, we recommend the following ones:

Some of these plugins do more than just caching and also include website optimization powerhouses, including functions such as image optimization, CSS & JS files optimization, database optimization, and more.

Minify JS/CSS Files

By minifying Javascript and CSS files, you will make your website smaller in size, hence, again, reducing the loading time.

A good way to do this is with one of the caching plugins mentioned above.

In this context it is also worth mentioning the Autoptimize WordPress plugin. Even though the plugin doesn’t help with caching per se, it does deal with image and files optimization.

Resize Large Images at Upload

The one factor with the most impact on the respective website size is media-rich items such as images or videos.

Often, websites contain very large images – often in “straight-from-the-camera” sizes. Frequently people don’t even consider this a problem but think about it: When you have several 7 MB pictures on a website and a user accesses it from a 3G carrier – it becomes clear that the size is critical!

The easiest way to make sure all pictures are of adequate size is to have them resized automatically, for example by using plug-ins. For WordPress, there are several plugins that have a solution for the situation:

Compress and Optimize images

This point sounds similar to the previous one but we can’t stress the importance of this enough: Images have a huge impact on the size of your site (and performance!). Converting your pictures into the right format is probably around 80% of your website optimization.

Again, plug-ins are your friend! For WordPress, there are many different plugins for image optimization available, some are part of general optimization plugins, others serve as stand-alone solutions. Here are some examples:

However, while striving for small pictures, always make sure you keep the image quality in mind. Smaller pictures mean lower quality. So what is the golden middle? Try to get the best of both worlds by going with the “glossy” approach: not too aggressive (lossy – best performance, at the cost of image quality) and not too soft (lossless – best image quality, low performance).

Lazy Load Images & Iframes (YouTube embeds, etc)

“Lazy loading images” (and iframes) means “loading images on websites asynchronously — that is after the above-the-fold content is fully loaded, or even conditionally, only when they appear in the browser’s viewport. This means that if users don’t scroll all the way down, images placed at the bottom of the page won’t even be loaded.” – Sitepoint

This is a great technique to speed up a website tremendously.

And once again – there are plugins for this.

There are various options out there – reaching from stand-alone solutions to plugins that are part for general performance enhancement efforts:

Always an up to date Technology (WordPress Plugin/Theme/Software)

This is a golden rule when it comes to IT: Make sure your technology is compliant with all the latest features, updates, and plugins AT ALL TIMES. This is essential for both security and performance reasons: These days there are constantly new updates released to keep up with the latest developments and security gaps. If your IT systems are not compatible with these new features you quickly fall behind.

And a hacked website is the last thing we want – it means you lose control over your OWN website and your rank that you worked so hard for will take an immediate dip.

If you work with WordPress, make sure to regularly update WordPress core, plugins, and themes.

Also, when it comes to web hosts, don’t forget that the respective server your site runs on must be modern and by the latest technology standard as well! Hence it should be running the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, Apache or Nginx, etc. Usually this is a given if you use a cloud web hosting platform like e.g. CloudWays or a more sophisticated one such as Kinsta.

Optimize Database regularly

This point is specifically targeted at WordPress users.

In WordPress, there is a central database that stores all your content and data, such as posts, pages and comments. However, over time, this database also piles up unnecessary “junk information” which slows it down. To ensure your database is operating at its maximum efficiency level, you will need to optimize it from time to time. Here are some plugins for this purpose: