WPO stands for Web Performance Optimization and is one of the key pillars for positioning a website today. User experience is closely linked to the website’s speed when loading and navigating it. If you want to reach the top positions on Google, you must understand that your website needs to be lightning fast!
We can say that WPO is a series of techniques to improve a website’s performance. Through best practices, not only does the website load faster, but it also allows users to interact with it easily.
The main part of Web Performance Optimization is Page Speed, which is the platform Google provides to measure whether your website meets the speed factors.
Advantages of a Website Optimized with a WPO Strategy
Without a doubt, original and well-written content remains the key factor for ranking, but it is increasingly difficult to appear on the first page of Google if your website is not well optimized. These are the main advantages of having good WPO:
Better Organic Ranking
If your website has good content and loads quickly, it means you are providing the user with what they are looking for without making them wait. This will generate a low bounce rate, which improves your content’s ranking. We know website speed is extremely important; users are becoming more impatient and unwilling to wait.
If you analyze websites in top Google results in a competitive sector, you will notice that almost all of them have a high score. Maintaining a clean code, low plugin load, and well-optimized images makes your site lighter and easier to load.
What is the main reason for slow loading?
As mentioned, plugins can significantly slow down your WordPress website (WPO in WordPress). Plugins that include sliders, page builders, or poorly optimized themes can cause major issues.
Another common mistake is uploading very heavy images with unnecessarily large dimensions. Using an image optimizer before uploading and adjusting them to the space they will occupy is a good practice. One of our optimization secrets is Compressor.io. You can also use plugins that optimize everything in bulk, like EWWW Image Optimizer.
Higher Conversion Rate
If the previous point didn’t convince you to improve your WPO strategy, this one surely will. Ultimately, everyone builds a website to achieve conversions. It is highly proven that a well-optimized website converts much better than a poorly optimized one. As mentioned, users are increasingly impatient. If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, you are already behind.
10 Points to Improve Your WPO Strategy
We can summarize how to improve Web Performance Optimization in the following points. You can find these issues by conducting a technical SEO audit:
- Get good hosting. It is the foundation of your website. If the foundation isn’t strong, achieving a well-optimized website will be difficult.
- Optimize and compress images. As mentioned, images should have appropriate size and weight.
- Don’t overload with plugins. A lightweight website with fewer plugins reduces JavaScript and CSS load. Design is important, but you can find a middle ground. 😉
- Choose a lightweight theme for your website. If you use a CMS like WordPress or Prestashop, pick well-optimized themes.
- Use a CDN. If you use many media files (images, videos, etc.), a CDN hosts them on servers close to your users, allowing faster loading.
- Preload fonts. If using Google Fonts, preload them so they are available when requested.
- Compress your JavaScript and CSS. Use a cache plugin such as “WP Rocket” or “Fastest Cache” for WordPress.
- Cache configuration. Proper cache plugin configuration is crucial. CAUTION! Don’t just tick all boxes; configure the plugin correctly.
- Reduce third-party impact. Avoid overloading your code with requests from Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Mailchimp, Yandex Metrica, etc.
- Use next-generation image formats. After optimizing image weight, use new formats like WebP. Plugins can help with this as well.
