Investing in SEO on a website that’s slow can be a waste of time and budget.
I can’t impress you enough with the importance of having a technically optimised website.
Any on- or off-page SEO work can be completely scuppered by a slow website, so you must ensure your site is technically optimised properly to improve your chances of ranking.
The first thing you need to do on your site is to run it through Google’s Page Speed Insights tool to get some idea of how well it’s optimised.
Now, there are two sets of results here – if your website gets enough traffic, you will see real-time results and diagnosis results.
Discover what your real users are experiencing.
If your site is new or does not get a lot of traffic, Google will not be able to provide these results as it doesn’t have enough data for it.
Don’t sweat this, and remember that if you do see data here, it’s historical data, so it can confuse a lot of people – if you’ve recently optimised your site but you see poor results in this section, it can just be that Google needs more time to update the data.
Diagnose performance issues.
This section is the most important one to focus on, as it provides real-time results for your site today.
You want these scores to be 90 or more and in the green.
The results for my site are above, and this is what you need for your website.
Why are technical optimisation scores important?
When Google’s tools score your site well, it makes sense that these good scores influence your rankings in the search results.
If this is not the fact, then what is the point of the tool?
Sure, 100s of other factors can affect how your website ranks, but this one is objective, and the results are from the horse’s mouth, so why would you not get your scores as high as possible?
These scores are [broadly] for technical optimisation on your site, so if you ask me to look at your SEO, this will be one of the first things I look at. If the scores are poor, it will be the first thing I suggest you improve.
The real question is, why are your scores worse than they should be?
When you commissioned a website, you probably assumed that it would be built correctly and optimised.
Sure, it’s the job of the web agency to create an optimised site in the first place.
Correct: I assume you are not a website developer, so how do you know if your site is optimised?
There are lots of things that can affect your WordPress technical SEO:
- Your site’s theme
- Your hosting
- The plugins you use
- Your content
- Your DNS
- Things you have asked the web agency to do
Let’s break the above down further.
Your Theme and optimisation.
A WordPress theme can make or break your site for SEO.
Cheap or free off-the-shelf themes can quickly bloat your code or slow things down, as can page-builder plugins.
The main issue with WordPress themes is that it doesn’t often become apparent that the theme is the problem until the site has been built and launched and fails to perform well in the search.
At this point, you have invested time and money into a site that scores poorly in Google’s tests – so what do you do now?
Your website hosting and how it can affect technical optimisation.
Luckily, poor hosting is easy to fix; you move your site to a better hosting platform and immediately see an improvement in your technical SEO scores.
Ideally, for a standard-sized site, you should invest at least £40 per month in hosting your site; anything cheaper than this will be slow.
How can I make such a sweeping statement? The cheaper the hosting, the more sites per server, the more strain on the server resources, and the slower your site.
Hostgator, Go Daddy, Ionos, or any hosting company that offers cheap hosting do so for a reason: they pile it high and sell it cheap, and the compromise is speed, support, and overall level of hosting service.
Get the best hosting you can afford; £100 per month is not expensive for a business website; it might be if you only turn £1000 per month, but then everything will be expensive.
How your plugins can affect technical SEO.
The more plugins on your site, the slower it will be – that’s a simple fact.
If whoever has built your site has installed more than 20 or so plugins, this is going to slow things down.
Plugins can use server resources, so the more resources they use, the more strain they can place on the server (especially if you have cheap hosting).
Another factor is the functionality the plugin adds to the site – for example, WooCommerce, which is a great plugin but a large one, needs more resources than a smaller plugin or a plugin that affects the back end only.
Your content can affect technical SEO, too.
If you have excessively large pages with lots of scripts and code, this, too, can slow down your site.
What you ask your developer to do on your site regarding the content can impact how Google ranks it; for example, take a standard function, a hero slider.
This is fine with a few small slides on a lightweight slider such as Slick Slider, but if you ask your web dev to install something like Revolution Slider because you think that the overly complex slide transitions are a must, that’s a content decision that just slows your site down.
Keeping your content lightweight and fast helps your technical SEO and ultimately benefits the visitor, so it’s a win-win.
Technically optimising your DNS.
This might sound odd, but if your DNS is served slowly, that will also impact your technical optimisation.
Services like Cloudflare provide an inexpensive way of speeding up your site by serving your DNS faster and with added benefits like an additional cache.
We are talking milliseconds here, but it all counts.
Check your site on Google Page Speed with your current DNS provider, then switch to Cloudflare and test again; I guarantee you will see an improvement.
Cloudflare also has a free plan to test it before spending any budget.
Decisions can make a difference, too.
In the example above, I mentioned how asking your dev team to install the Revolution slider can slow your site down, as can other questionable decisions.
Listen to your web developer when they tell you something is not a great idea or could be done differently.
An experienced developer builds sites for speed, UX and SEO: if you ask them to do things simply out of personal preferences that slow the site, there’s little they can do when you want your site scores north of 90/100.
If you are unsure about any aspects of your site’s optimisation, I can run a WordPress health check for your site to uncover what might be wrong with it.
I work with people who are serious about SEO.
I love optimising websites and will help you improve your current scores. While I don’t guarantee >90 in the tests, we can achieve the best your site can.
Book a callIt’s always better to have a faster site.
There is no winning argument for a website being less fast.
Technical optimisation is the first thing you need to get sorted on your SEO journey, don’t invest in any other forms of SEO before you get your site sorted.
There are some important steps in getting this process done and done properly and these are:
- Make sure whoever builds your site sorts your technical optimisation right after the site goes live.
- Remember that Google (et al.) is probably going to index your site mobile-first, so even if 90% of your visitors are on desktop, it’s the mobile scores that count.
- Do not settle for scores less than 90/100, this is the minimum your site deserves.
Don’t underestimate the differences optimisation makes.
One of the main reasons I only work with people who are serious about SEO is that improving the speed of your site can require some drastic improvements.
Even the best polish won’t make rubbish shine.
If you’ve been delivered a webshite, then there is often only so much that technical optimisation can do.
If your current site scores 35/100 and I manage to get it to 75/100, that’s a 114% increase – a significant improvement, but still not good enough.
Going from 35/100 to 95/100 represents a 171% increase, and this is very challenging and might even need a complete site rework.
Technical optimisation expectations.
Achieving a 171% improvement on your site is probably not achievable in reality, as in the example above it represents a change of over 60 percentage points.
This is where reality comes into play, and we have to make some tough decisions.
- You stick with a lower-than-perfect score and hope for the best or;
- You reinvest in the site to get it up to speed.
I don’t particularly like delivering this news, but it’s a reality – if you have a shoddy site built, you are always going to be facing an uphill battle when it comes to SEO and ranking, so the decisions you make should be based on data and your customers.
If you are in an extreme niche or offer a product or service that is unique, great content with low scores does, in truth, stand a good chance of ranking because your competition will be low, and what you are offering will be less hard to rank due to it’s unique and one-of-a-kind nature.
If you have a me-too offering (such as SEO services) then it’s time to consider if you can live with 65/100 when the top-ranking sites are 99/100 – technical optimisation is 100% going to come into play here.
Rebuilding your site to improve your site speed.
One of the great benefits of WordPress is that the content is separate from the markup, so if you’ve built all your pages and your site is slow, it’s often possible to re-theme the site to get the results and avoid having to redo all the content again.
This does reduce the potential costs of rebuilding your WordPress site to improve its speed, but it’s not a given—I would need to examine your current site before I can give you a solid answer about how best to proceed.
Unlike many aspects of SEO, technical SEO is not a subjective opinion.
Choosing keywords to chase or texts for anchor links can be subjective, but technical SEO utilises many tools to give you objective scores and results.
This is one of the main things I love about technical SEO; I can score your site, do some work and prove the results and improvements.
This means that you can be 100% confident that the money you have spent optimising your site has made significant improvements to it.
My advice, for any client, size of site or target audience is to make sure your site scores are all in the green, which means higher than 90/100.
If you don’t do this and then invest in other types of SEO, you will always wonder whether your site speed is hindering your results.
If your site is optimised to over 95/100 in the test, you can confidently say that it’s definitely not your site speed but some more subjective things that need to be addressed.
Dave
Dave is a WordPress SEO expert with over 20 years experience in designing, building and optimising WordPress (and non-WordPress) websites for people who are serious about SEO and want to generate more new business from their websites. He's run a creative agency for 25+ years, employs 17 staff and enjoys a good rant about SEO.
