In todays episode we are talking about SEO site performance. Want more? Come visit my website at https://jjspontondesigns.com

When people hear the words SEO, they are probably thinking, okay, let's add some metadata and keywords to my site.  But no, that's not all you do when you are adding improving the SEO of your site.

What is SEO

SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO deals with ALL things that optimize the user's search results when they are searching the web. Sure, a few keywords help Google to know the niche of your website. However, what if people are landing on your site which has a slow loading speed, and the website is not user-friendly? Well, they are going to click that little back button and keep going down the search results until they land on the site that's quickly and is most relevant to them. Google calls this your bounce rate. It is just as important as adding all of those keywords to your website. 

Here are a few statistics:

• On April 9th of 2010, Google announced that site speed is essential for search ranking
  • https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html
• The probability of bounce increases by 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds.
  • https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/data/page-load-time-statistics/

Both of these are from google directly as well, which proves just how vital your site speed and performance are. 

So how can you ensure that your site is fast?Here are a few things that you can do. 

Check your hosting:

First, make sure you check your hosting company. Research reviews on your hosting company and sees others' experiences with it. Also, if you have some extra cash to spend, I recommend updating your hosting package to a dedicated server instead of a shared server. The reason for this is, on a shared server, you are sharing the space with other websites. Those websites may not be optimized for speed. If there are many slow websites on your shared hosting plan, it's going to slow your site down, no matter what you do to optimize it. On a dedicated server, your website is the only one on it, so all the data is only being used by you. 

Optimize your images

Sure, you might think that the 3000px image is a good idea to upload to your site. I mean, who wants to take the chance of a blurry and pixelated image, right? Wrong. If you look at the average resolution sizes for desktop https://www.reinisfischer.com/browser-wars-screen-resolutions-2019, you see that that you don't need anything more substantial than 1920x1080. And that's if your images are going to the full size of the background. If they are not, you could resize your images to be no larger than 1400 px width. 

Image format also matters. If you can use jpg images, those are smaller and help with keeping your site speed fast. The only time you would need to use an image in the png format is if you want a transparent image. Otherwise, keep your images as jpg. 

Less is more.

If you are building your website with WordPress, I'm sure you know how easy it is to install numerous plugins, trying to accomplish what you want to do, only to realize you don't need that plugin after all. When you do this, you are adding more data to your website than what is required. Not to mention, this can turn into a security issue. Its best practice to only install plugins you know you will use. And if you have any deactivated plugins, delete them — no need to keep unused pl