When thinking of SEO, many people often forget about user experience and website performance. This can be disastrous since these two factors are among the main factors affecting SEO.
Consider a situation where visitors are redirected to your site, but once they get there, they have to wait a few seconds for the pages to load. The result is that they’ll leave the site, and the bounce rate will be recorded by search engines.
Eventually, your rank on Google and similar engines will fall. So, how can you improve performance and user experience on your website? Read on to find out.
Use the Right Hosting Plan
One of the key things that determine the performance of your site is the hosting plan you use. You should consider using a VPS hosting plan since it offers certain advantages over a shared hosting service.
For example, you won’t be sharing any of the resources, meaning your site will run optimally. A good VPS hosting service will also allow for more customization options. This is different from a shared hosting plan as this is already configured and ready to use.
It is worth noting that VPS hosting plans are fairly cheap as you will typically just need to pay for the resources you’re using. With a dedicated hosting plan, you’ll need to pay for the entire server, regardless of the percentage of the resources you use.
Fix Broken Backlinks
Broken backlinks redirect users to an error page and cause confusion and inconvenience. The result is that visitors to your site will get a poor user experience and will find your site less authoritative.
You can fix broken backlinks by restoring the broken page or recreating the page from a broken URL.
Optimize Image Sizes
File size has a major impact on the speed and performance of a website. If you need to upload complex images like photographs, you should use raster file formats like JPEG and PNG.
Vector file formats are better for logos and icons. To optimize image size, you can resize the pictures to appropriate dimensions or use image compression tools.
Use Website Caching
Website caching allows browsers to save a copy of a website whenever a user opens different web pages. This means the browser won’t have to load the same files again when the user launches the website.
That means you’ll reduce the number of requests, bandwidth, and load time. The files will be stored until their time to live (TTL) expires or until the user chooses to clear their browser cache.
Conclusion
Website performance and speed are among the key contributors to search engine optimization. There are several steps you can take to optimize your site. You can start by checking whether your hosting plan is suitable for your needs.
It is also important to fix broken backlinks as these make your site less convenient to use. Finally, you need to optimize the images on your site and leverage website caching.
