Website performance optimisation

Google website speed testing

Google PageSpeed is a great way to test your website’s performance, but optimizing and improving your website’s speed is a different story. There are numerous techniques and programming practices that contribute to good load speeds, all of which we apply through the entirety of our development process.

These page load times not only contribute to user experience but are a significant factor in Google’s search rankings. If your page is running slowly, get in touch and see how we can help you improve those page speeds, improve user experience and contribute to SEO, all done with cutting edge technology and programming techniques.

Optimize website performance

Your website’s optimization isn’t just about load times. Optimized websites result in high return visits, higher conversions rate, low bounce rates, increased engagement, better user experience, and higher ranks in organic searches. Ultimately these factors translate into increased traffic and therefore revenue.

The first step in website optimization is to assess the situation. This is done by conducting an audit to determine loading times and identify elements of your website that are causing it to slow down. There are many tools you can use to assess your website’s optimization; Google PageSpeed Insights and YSlow have commonly used tools and are completely free.

Here is a list of optimization changes that we commonly apply to our clients’ websites:

• Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
• Optimize the media on your website (images, videos)
• Minify your JavaScript & CSS files
• Database optimization
• Use website caching
• Detect 404 errors
• Use prefetching techniques

Here at Vi, we specialize in optimizing our client’s websites to ensure they provide their users with an optimal experience, and so they rank highly in organic searches.

Google ranking factors

Google considers numerous factors when it provides search results. The quality and amount of these factors you have considered and implemented on your website will determine how successful it will be against competitors who rank for similar search words (keywords). Here are a few things to consider when trying to increase the prominence of your website in search results:

• Page speed: your website loading times for pages and different elements plays a key role in user experience and therefore ranking factor. Google will not display your webpage as a primary result if it is slow, clunky, and can not be used seamlessly by the end-user;
• Content: Your website’s content such be clear, concise, relevant, and not too marketing-focused. It should be updated regularly and kept short and to the point;
• UX Design: user experience is not just about how the user enjoys using your website, but about the ease of use, through clear and obvious navigation, content placement, and understandable layout
• Responsiveness: Your website should be viewable on all devices. This means allowing for different sized screens, platforms & operating systems. Google wants to provide results that will be sufficient for all its users, therefore if your website lacks responsiveness in one of these areas, you’re likely to not rank well
• Internal & external links: Using links is a great way to boost your website. These links need to lead to relative, trustworthy entities, that contain relative information to the linked word or sentence.

Google’s ranking factors are constantly evolving to ensure their users get the most relevant search results at that given time. One major change taking place is called Google’s Core Web Vitals. These are a new set of metrics that will be the core of how Google ranks your website from May 2021. You can learn more about Google’s core web vitals by reading our extensive article.