How To Improve Page Speed

One thing that I’ve discovered from being online for over twenty years is that you have to stay in the game. You cannot become complacent with your website. Technology changes and so should your website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of those “things” you need to keep up to date with. While some of the strategies stay the same other items such as page speed seems to have changed over the years.

Why Does Page Speed Matter?

I want to explain how to improve page speed what it matters and the tools I’ve used to get the A+ ranking that we’re searching for.

You would think with the higher bandwidth speeds we have access too page speed would not be an issue but many search engines will give you better placement in their rankings if your page loads quicker than others.

Obviously there are other factors to getting good SE listings but page speed is know to be one of them and that is our focus today.

Earlier in the year I had noticed that my page rankings had slipped from where they once were and as I may have mentioned in earlier articles I started looking at why.

My first step was to optimize my images by utilizing a plugin to reduce image size which does affect page speed as well. I went with the Short Pixel plugin but I’ve also been told the Ewww Image Optimizer is good as well.

The second step I did was to change the themes. While that probably didn’t have any effect on page speed I had noticed the previous themes code wasn’t as clean when viewing the page source.

From there I went to one of the tools I’ve used over the years GTMetrix to test page speed. In the first scan I failed I had a the F grade in several places. I will admit it had been a year or so since I had tested my website with their tool and things have changed on what is being tested.

What Page Speed Tools Did I Use?

Instead of talking about page caching, and JavaScript loading, and deferring CSS, I will to save you time so that you can increase your page speed quicker and share with you the tools I used to receive the A+ rating we’re all looking for.

I will link to each one so that you can read about what they do, but if you are going to implement them they are all plugins you can add from the back end of your website by searching for them in the add plugin section.

• Autoptimize
• CSS JS Manager, Async JavaScript, Defer Render Blocking CSS
• Leverage Browser Caching
• WP Performance Score Booster
• Short Pixel Image Optimizer
• or EWWW Image Optimizer

While I’m not one to add a bunch of plug-ins to my website, I felt this was the easiest way to achieve the goals I needed to reach. There are ways to do some of these steps without a plugin. That is if you are proficient with htaccess and have time to compress the images yourself among other code manipulation.

I hope you found this article useful in helping you to improve your page speed. I’d love to hear your results go ahead and leave a comment below to share your success or even your questions if you have them.