Site speed is one of the reasons to determine if you get a good ranking in Search Engine like Google. Although site speed has a notable history of being not a priority in SEO, today it’s importance is necessary and relevant in growing your business. A slow website may develop a slow crawling rate, Google will be slower to fetch pages on your site and thus might take longer to index new content. Making your website faster will be a relatively easy way to increase the chance of getting high rankings in Google.
Moreover, a fast site will give a much better User Experience than a slow one. That’s is also a very important reason to make sure the speed of your site is optimal ( Moreover, other improvements to make sure your site will rank properly in Google is to do keyword research. You should definitely also look into unique blog post ideas, or Basic SEO training to learn more).
Tools to check your site speed
On our affordable and cheap SEO services to a wide array of Massachusetts-based company, we always check the site speed of a website. Obviously, site speed is different when checking it from different locations. Just one reason why speed tools do not always provide the same results. That is why we use all these tools in our site reviews (and do not rely on just one):
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Pingdom Tools
- Yslow
- WebPageTest
Google PageSpeed Insights splits mobile and desktop, Pingdom Tools allows for multiple locations and Yslow segments their checks nicely. WebPageTest has a few main checks it grades nicely. We would recommend to use all of these tools to check your site speed. Together, they give the most complete overview of the site speed of your site.
If you want to test your site speed, you can enter the URL of your website in these tests. They review the speed of this site and give a list of options on how to improve your site speed. Both Google and YSlow have reasonably good, though slightly technical, explanations on the various aspects that you can improve. The other tools show a little less explanation and are a bit harder to interpret.
Plugins you should use
There are several major caching plugins for WordPress which will make your site much faster, the most well-known ones being W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and WP Rocket.
While W3 Total Cache is technically a very good plugin and can do almost all of the things we’ve mentioned that you should be doing, we’ve also found it to be dangerous. It’s as though you’re giving a kid a butchers knife. Things might (and relatively often does) go wrong, so we no longer endorse W3 Total Cache for every user.
WP Super Cache does what it says on the tin: it caches your site. It does that well, without too many bells and whistles. WP Rocket is better, they offer a solution to speed up your site without much hassle and without the risks of breaking things. WP Rocket is a paid plugin though.
Faith SEO Tip: Use WP Rocket if you don’t mind paying a little money, and choose WP Super Cache if you don’t want to spend anything.
Hosting
Site speed has a lot to do with your hosting. Many problems with site speed are actually things your hosting party could take care of for you. Hosts like Hostinger and Hostgator will do this and more and more hosts are start doing this as well.
It’s important to realize though, that it’s absolutely worth it to invest in good hosting, both for site speed as well as for security reasons. $5 a month for hosting is, if you’re serious about your website, just not enough. If you can afford it, go for managed WordPress hosting and you’ll get a lot more help in improving your site.
