WPO or Web Performance Optimization
What is WPO ? This is a question SEO ranking everyone in the digital marketing world is asking these days. But to explain it, let’s start from the beginning.
When we create a website, what do we want? Well, it’s obvious: to appear on the first page of search engines. In our case, the most used is Google, so what we want is to appear on its first page. To achieve this, we’re going to focus on SEO . At Sayonara, we already wrote a post discussing the importance of SEO positioning , so we won’t go into that in depth. We’ll simply say that SEO positioning is the technique used to improve the visibility of a website in the search results of various search engines.
Another important thing to know is that Google currently takes into account two of the factors it most considers when displaying search results: the final user experience and the technical aspects of the website . So, we have to ask ourselves, what do users and Google SEO ranking want from a website? Quality and speed. And this is where WPO comes in.
Web Performance Optimization
Better known in the digital marketing world by its acronym WPO , is nothing more than Web Performance Optimization . It refers to all the actions we can carry out on a website to minimize loading time . This means that the time between the user entering the website how to create an email retargeting strategy that builds customer loyalty? and the website displaying its content should be as short as possible.
Pages that take “too long” to load bore users, and they end up abandoning them. Even if they know the content is quality, they won’t return. That’s why time has become one of the most important factors in the digital age . Ideally, a website should take less than 2 seconds to load . In this case, we’d be talking about a fast, well-optimized website. But it typically takes between 2 and 4 seconds. So, if your website takes more SEO ranking than 4 seconds to load, you have a problem.
In short, if you want to achieve good SEO rankings, you have to work on WPO. And in this post, we’ll give you some tips digital marketing: understand the importance of educating the customer! to improve your website’s ranking and loading speed .
7 Keys to WPO and Improve Positioning
1. Servers
When we hire a server to create our website, we should consider it like we do anything else: value for money. Sometimes, cheap can be expensive when it comes to loading times, which directly impacts our SEO ranking.
There are many hosting companies SEO ranking out there, and we shouldn’t be swayed by advertising or by the fact that some are more well-known than others. To choose one or another, you need to consider certain technical aspects:
- Storage capacity: When taiwan lists choosing a hosting plan, keep in mind that most websites share storage space, so the available space is limited. If we leave that disk empty, it will result in suboptimal loading speeds.
- Disk type: There are two types of disks, HDD and SSD, with the latter having faster read and write speeds. It’s true that they’re more expensive, but they’re worth it, as they can reduce website load times by up to 2 seconds .
- RAM capacity: Low RAM capacity will make loading processes slower and inefficient.
- Amount of data traffic: Most have a traffic limit, so if our website has higher traffic, its speed will be affected.
2. Code optimization
When we click to access a SEO ranking website, we’re actually downloading all of its elements. The time it takes to load a web page is affected by the size of these elements, so they need to be optimized.
Some of these elements are the codes that make up the website. To optimize the code, we must minify it, compress it, and make each language unique .
- Minify : The more optimized our website code is, the faster it will load. So we need to avoid any white space , indentation , or unnecessary code .
- Compress : We all know that compressing a file makes it smaller . A web page is made up of a set of files, so we can compress them to increase loading speed. For this, we have Gzip compression .
- Single language : Each code file should only contain code from its own language. This means there should be no PHP code in an HTML document.
3. Plugins
Plugins are an excellent aid when creating a website and, in some cases, are absolutely necessary. But we must be careful because the more plugins we install, the slower the website will be. Only install the ones that are truly necessary .
4. Multimedia content
When we create a website, we all like it to look good. And what better way to make the site beautiful and dynamic than by adding photos, videos, music, etc. What we don’t realize is that if we upload all the multimedia content as is, we’ll be making the website very slow. This, in turn, hurts our rankings, and that’s not what we want.
Videos , audios , presentations , etc. are usually the content that takes up the most space. What’s usually done in this case is to use external services to host them. To display them on the website, all we need is an embed code. This way, we reduce the size and increase the loading speed of the website .
5. Activate cache memory
Every time a user visits a website, files are downloaded. The cache is responsible for storing this data so that when the user visits the site again, they only have to open the file. This process is much faster than if they had to download them again.
6. Blocking Hotlinking
Hotlinking is a bad practice used to plagiarize content . This practice consists of offering any type of document on your website that is actually hosted on another website. The problem directly affects the original content owner, as it can overload their server and increase loading times.
Currently, most hosting providers have the option to block it through the cpanel .
7. Use a CDN
A CDN is a content delivery network . This consists of hosting copies of our website’s content on a series of servers located in different parts of the world that are connected to each other via the internet. When a user accesses the website, if they have a CDN, the content they access will be downloaded from the server closest to them instead of the main one. This makes the page load speed faster and prevents the main server from becoming overloaded by not receiving all requests to access the website.