When it comes to skyrocketing website traffic in 2023, one of the most important SEO practices that you need to follow is website optimization. Optimizing the website is not easy and involves important metrics which are listed below.
Mobile-friendly pages
Did you ever perform one of the best SEO practices which is checking whether your website is mobile responsive or not? If not, you should do it now. There is a free tool by Google where you can check the mobile-friendliness of the website. All you need to do is to enter the URL and it will carry out the mobile-friendliness test automatically.
The tool will automatically let you know whether the page is mobile responsive or not. The tool by Google right away tests how easily a visitor can use the website pages on a mobile device or smartphone. It even provides you with some page loading issues so you can work on them to give the best experience to the website users.
The following are the tools that you can use to check the mobile responsiveness of the website:
- a. GTMetrix
- b. Pingdom tools
Why mobile-friendly pages can make or break your SEO success?
More and more people are now making use of their mobiles to browse information online such as web portals, eCommerce stores, and other websites. If your website does not load well on mobiles, they simply abandon your website and land on the website of one of your competitors. So, why are you wasting your traffic and sales?
The following are some of the reasons to focus on making the pages mobile responsive:
- Mobile friendly pages consume smaller sizes and hence load really faster
- Easy to access all the pages, navigation, and menu with responsive design
- A flexible layout gives the audience an easy to scroll up and down
- Mobile-friendly websites load really faster and the content is easy to read when compared
to traditional websites which are not responsive
So, why are you still waiting? Make the website mobile responsive if you have not yet!
How to make the website mobile-friendly and better for both SEO and users?
There are basically two ways to turn the website mobile-friendly which are:
- Responsive web design
- Using a plugin to make the website mobile-friendly
Let us now explore the two ways in detail so you can make the website mobile responsive which
provides you with more traffic and online visibility.
a. Responsive web design
Google recommended way is to have a responsive website design where your website serves the same HTML code on the same URL regardless of the devices of the visitors of the website such as a mobile or desktop. But it can render the display differently depending on the screen size.
Either you can hire a designer or a use a responsive theme to make the website responsive. We would suggest you to have a look at responsive website designs such as Elegant themes, Genesis, GeneratePress, etc., which cost you really less but come with built-in mobile-friendly features.
b. Using WPTouch plugin
If you can’t manage to pay for a premium responsive theme or a designer, you can simply install a free WordPress plugin known as WPTouch that will turn your website into mobile responsive.
Secure Site Connection
Almost every website is realizing the significance of using a secure site connection (HTTPS versions) and Google even gives more value to secure websites with HTTPS connections.
What is a secure site connection?
Any website address that starts with HTTPS:// (s stands for ‘secure’) is considered safe to browse and is also known as a secure site connection. It can even be referred to as HTTPS connection (the abbreviation is Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure) which is the secure version of HTTP.
What makes it so imperative?
HTTPS secure site connections have the following advantages:
- Increase the website conversions and sales when compared to a non-HTTPS website
- HTTPS is a must for accelerated mobile pages (AMP is turning out to be one of the SEO best
practices) - Always better for users (the website audience feels safe if the website is equipped with an
HTTPS) - When you compare an HTTPS website with an HTTP website, the HTTPS website will get a little better prospect of ranking higher in Google search (Google gives value to secured websites)
And the list goes on!
How to put HTTPS into practice on your website?
So, let us now get into the most important question. How can you actually put HTTPS into practice on the website to get all the advantages we discussed above?
To create a secure site connection or HTTPS on the website, you will need SSL certificates which you can get from either the hosting provider or domain registration company. A few hosting companies such as WPX hosting provide them for free while others might charge you a couple of dollars.
Simply you need to connect with the web hosting customer support team and ask them for installing SSL certificates on the website or if you have not launched the website yet, go for WPX hosting and you will get everything.
No 404 errors
404 error pages are really harmful to any website and the website can even get penalized by Google if you have excessive amounts of 404 error pages. This is for the reason that they will give a bad experience to the website audience.
What exactly is a 404 error?
To put it simply, a 404 error is a non-existent web page on any website. If you removed a blog post or web page which is already linked from another page, it will usually return a 404 error when someone tries to access it.
It means Google search engine bots can’t access the 404 errors along with the website audience so it is better to find and fix them as soon as possible.
Why are 404 errors so harmful to the SEO of any website?
How to come across and fix the 404 issues of a website?
The 1 st step is to stumble on 404 error pages. One of the most promising ways to do that is to make use of a broken link checker. Or, you can make use of tools such as the Screaming frog SEO spider tool for link analysis. It will show you all the error codes so you can separate them in a spreadsheet to work on them later.
The easiest approach to fix 404 error pages on the website is to make use of 301 redirects which is one of the SEO links best practices. 301 redirect is one of the safest SEO practices for web page redirection. For instance, if you have a broken link or 404 error page, you can easily fix it by making use of 301 redirects to another live page.
How can you use 301 redirects?
You can do it manually but it is very much complicated so we highly recommend you to get access to the 301 redirect plugins, such as:
- Simple 301 redirects
- Redirection
- 301 redirects etc.
Blazing fast website speed
25% of users right away leave the website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. That is a truth and you must focus on making the website loading times super fast to get more traffic and sales.
What makes website speed the key to better SEO?
If you are browsing information online, nothing frustrates you more than a slow-loading website, isn’t it? Every person hates to spend their time on a slow-loading website. Slow loading times not just kill your website user experience but can hurt the search engine rankings. The following are a few of the advantages of faster loading websites.
- Google uses website speed as one of the key ranking factors. So, if you would like more traffic from Google, get a faster loading website. It is as simple as that.
- As per the research done by Kissmetrics, 40% of people will abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. And, 47% of users expect a page to load in two seconds or less. That means, faster loading websites have a better advantage.
How to make a website speed super fast?
You can find a detailed guide about increasing website speed where you will find all the tips and tricks you can implement to speed up the website loading times and performance. The following are some of the additional simple yet quick tips you can do to make the website loading times faster.
a. Be familiar with the reasons behind your slow loading times of the website
Before even thinking about speeding up the website, you should know the factors which are having an effect on the loading times. You can use free tools such as GTmetrix, YSlow, Pingdom tools, etc., to know your website performance and they even provide you with suggestions regarding what you can do to improve the speed of the website.
b. Get rid of unwanted baggage from websites
You need to get rid of the additional burden from the websites. These include some of the major things which can slow down the speed of the website.
- Usage of plugins – limit it to under 15
- Clear cache
- Clear databases
- Clear and optimize all the images
- Do not use too many widgets or flashy elements
Above all, do not play with the CSS code to make the design of the website look more beautiful. If you are a novice, you will mess up with the coding and worsen the speed of the website. In addition, use post revisions, you can use plugins to limit the post revisions as they create so much burden on the databases which ultimately affects the loading times.
Last but not least, get rid of all the spam comments, and one-liners and if possible, try to get rid of gravatar images. That way, you will be able to improve the web page loading times really faster.
Get a better hosting plan
Practicing the right SEO activities is the surefire way to bring more visitors from search engines such as Google. Simply make sure to try them out one by one and stick to the best ones that give you the most promising results.
Dwarika Web Solutions is a leading SEO company that can help you outshine your competition. Feel free to contact us at +1 (855) 561-4557 to speak with a professional!