Hello friends!
Welcome to our series for the busy-but-still want-good-SEO types: 30 minute tips!
SEO can feel super overwhelming. There are so many possibilities of things you could do, so where do you start?
Our 30 minute tips are here to help.
Each tip gives you everything you need to get one great-for-SEO task completed in less time than it takes to run out for a Starbucks.
Because we know that you want SEO, but don’t want to spend all day trying to get it.
Also in this series:
How to get Featured in a Rich Snippet
The What:
You know the feeling you get when you see the dreaded rainbow wheel, or hear that archaic term, “buffering”?
That frustration you feel is just what your clients feel when your site doesn’t load.
Your clients want to visit your site! But when they come over and find that the pages don’t load right away– they leave.
Just to be clear, when we talk about a “fast” site, we’re talking loading–completely–in less than 2 seconds. Anything more, and you lose people, and you lose Google.
The Why:
Site speed matters.
Did you know that if your site takes more than 2 seconds to load, most people leave and never come back?? That’s crazy!
You work so hard on getting great traffic to your site, so it’s wise to do everything you can to make it easy on people once they’re there.
The How:
We’ve written about how to optimize your images before, and we’ve written an in-depth post about why it all matters. Read those for more info; read here for the quick tips.
Start here →
1. Use this FREE tool from Google to see your site speed and to determine your top priority for improvements.
2. We also love this tool from Pingdom, which gives us a different kind of insight in a prettier format. Use both tools for best results.
So, here’s how to make it happen:
Pro Tip: To truly keep this to 30 minutes, pick only one of these. Come back another day and pick another off this list to complete.
Plus, bookmark the Google Speed Insights link and this post, and check every few months. Things change, and it takes 2 minutes to monitor, so set a calendar reminder to stay on top of it.
WordPress Users:
- Get a better quality hosting service
- Resize your images
- Delete unused/old plugins
- Remove unnecessary ads (are they worth the decrease in speed and sales?)
- Use a paid theme, as they get updated to work with the latest WP release
- Install a tool like WP Rocket to decrease heavy code that weighs down your site speed
- Delete unused/unpublished pages on your site (Google still has to scan these!)
Squarespace Users:
The advantage of squarespace in terms of speed is that they monitor their servers to keep them fast, and they automatically optimize your image sizes (although it’s not completely done for you). While you have less control in some areas, it’s nice that they handle some of the big things for you.
That said, there are some steps you can take to decrease your Squarespace site’s load time.
- Learn best practices for optimizing your images
- Delete unused/unpublished pages on your site (Google still has to scan these!)
- Limit yourself to 2 fonts-total– and be sure to use websafe fonts
- Use blog snippets instead of the whole post on the front page
- Remove unnecessary custom code
- Spread content out over multiple pages, rather than one super huge page. This is also just good design strategy.
Got it?
Friends, we hope this 30 Minute Tip helps! If you use any of these tips, let us know how it goes.
We’re cheering you on, and are in your corner for all things SEO. Follow us on Instagram for more quick tips, and sign up for our email list to get all the goods first.
Xo,
Clapping Dog Media Team