Speeding up website for better rankings

Hi all,

Not sure if this is in fact the right section- I only have basic knowledge of working with website stuff that is self taught and I would consider myself extremely beginner.

That being said I have been noticing my web traffic going down over the past few months and I have now dropped from 1000 page views a day to 200-400. I have been reading around and some things have pointed to Google ranking sites based on mobile optimization and speedy loading times.

I dropped my home page url: highperformancejunkies.com into some speed optimization websites and they are telling me my site is running on the slower side. I have tried downloading some cache pluggins and optimizer plug ins which made it a bit faster, but I am still considered “slow”.

Since I worry this may be impacting traffic on my site I was hoping someone can help point me in the right direction on some easy things I can do to make my speeds a little faster and hopefully bring my traffic back up.

Please keep in mind I am a super beginner with this stuff and will need you to really dumb it down for me.

Thanks in advance to anyone that can help point me in the right direction

 

Letzride, I put your webpage into Google's Pagespeed Insights. The results were surprising. You scored an excellent 97/100 for the Desktop results. But the same page in the Mobile results scored a very low 18/100. And remember that Google is now priorizing the Mobile index. Go to Google Pagespeed Insights and have it analyze your page. It will give you details on a lot of things needing to be changed. If you have a friend or family member who is website savvy, you would be well advised to have them look at the Pagespeed Insights results and give you advice on the major items to deal with (P.S. Your home page is mobile friendly, which is good).

 

Yeah your website looks really amazing If you want to do the SEO because you want to get the SEO clients then what I will recommend you do not just be depend on the Google start running the Facebook ads Instagram ads YouTube ads and even the Google Adword.

Because that is from where you will get most of the clients and the clients which will be ready to pay.

Yeah especially the voice search is coming which means the Google will be more focusing on the website which will load up fast on both mobile and desktop .

In order to improve the speed of your website you need to have a good hosting.

 

Your desktop version works fine when I test it. Your website shows it is a mobile friendly site, but shows page partially loaded.When it is loading on a mobile device, it is being broken. So if most of your traffic sees your site on their mobile device, they are just been going out from your site. So concern to develop your mobile version optimization. I believe, you are using a good hosting. So the only thing you should do now is to make your site more mobile friendly.

 

yup also remember about voice search

 

I have no idea about voice search. Can you tell me a bit?

 

its hard to tell by writing here so go on youtube and search Neil patel blog ranking and watch his videos and you will learn s lot after that if you have any query let me know if i can help and also comment on neil's videos he replies to every comment

 

Basically, voice search is said to be more common in the future, people will search Google by verbally asking questions rather than typing in keywords etc.

You can read about optimizing voice search from these resources.

https://www.greenlanemarketing.com/blog/voice-search-optimization/

https://www.singlegrain.com/seo/effective-seo-techniques-that-work/#optimize-voice

https://dynomapper.com/blog/21-site...voices-will-mold-the-future-of-search-engines

 

Below are some of the ways that you as beginner can manage to improve your website speed:

• Reduce the complete load of your website by optimizing images, minifying your code and reducing the total number of HTTPS requests.
• Caching stores the local copies of content from your site and it helps to load the flat files faster than the dynamic files. So, leverage browser caching.
• Make use of a CDN. It helps in caching your site on a global network of servers. When a particular file is requested from your site by a user, that request is routed to the closest server.
• Enable GZIP compression on your website to reduce the file size.

 

Has there any CND service where I can register for free? I found for now all are paid.

 

Thanks all - I will start looking into solutions for some of the suggestions. I'll have to start by researching each piece first as I don't quite understand how to do much of it.

Question though - why would I have quick load times via desktop but not mobile? I feel like hosting wouldn't be the issue if I have such a great score from a desktop? And what about some of the other suggestions made by Milesweb? Why don't they impact desktop load times? - Sorry if these are dumb questions.

 

Cloudflare has a free CDN option.

 

I am not sure I want to do a cloudflare setup - I feel that is a lot like photobucket. When photobucket started charging forums lost half of their content because the photos got blocked out. I have more of a piece of mind knowing all of my content is hosted on my site and will be there as long as I keep paying the bills.

I have taken a two step approach and I am hoping it will work. My first step is I have looked to address the hosting issue. Previously I was on a shared hosting plan through hostgator - I have now moved my site to cloud hosting (well a ticket is in so 72 hours from now it should be fully migrated). 2nd to that, I plan on running a new wordpress template. I searched for ones that are the best for fast loading and responsiveness and have narrowed it down to two that seem to allow me to keep a similar structure / layout to my site with respect to my logo. They are Generate Press and Astra. Since I am playing around with the live preview now I hope to tackle this on Sunday at some point.

I have also downloaded a plugin for lazy loading - although it doesn't seem like it made the site any faster?

I am hoping that the combination of these things will spike my speed up so I can recover my traffic. I am also hoping it will not take a very long time to recover once the speed is corrected.

 

This forum seems to be more interesting, I read all the comments, it's increasing my knowledge

 

so I went and did the following for my site: http://highperformancejunkies.com

• Upgraded my hosting from shared to cloud hosting with hostgator
• upgraded to a new wordpress theme that is supposed to be much "faster" for both mobile/desktop- Generatepress
• downloaded the "smush" plugin - a compressor for all images on my site
• eliminated all unused plugins.

After all of that...my website speeds remain the same. Which is disappointing.

I also download an AMP plugin and when I convert my site to AMP everything scores in the high greens in all of the speed tests I run...the problem is, at the present time if I run AMP it interferes with the Javascript for the navigation menu (or so I understand). This results in the navigation menu being inoperable when using the mobile site. Which means the site becomes useless to anyone using a mobile device. I tried using two different wordpress themes (generate press and Astra) which are supposed to be some of the fastest themes for desktop/mobile from what I have read. No luck with either and having AMP work properly when using mobile so I have deactivated that.

So I have frustrated myself because I really thought that cloud hosting was supposed to be way better and faster than shared hosting, yet it seems to have made no difference.

 

Here are some way that helps you in improving your page speed:-

• Time To First Byte identifies the time at which your server sends a response
• Resources are blocking the first paint of your page. Consider delivering critical JS/CSS inline and deferring all non-critical JS/styles.
• Serve images in next-gen formats. Image formats like JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP often provide better compression than PNG or JPEG, which means faster downloads and less data consumption
• Serve images that are appropriately-sized to save cellular data and improve load time.
• Reduce JavaScript execution time
• Avoid multiple page redirects
• Enable text compression
• Minifying JavaScript files can reduce payload sizes and script parse time

 

• Time To First Byte identifies the time at which your server sends a response
  I have no idea what this means or how to address it?
• Resources are blocking the first paint of your page. Consider delivering critical JS/CSS inline and deferring all non-critical JS/styles.
  I have no idea what this means or how to address it?
  
• Serve images in next-gen formats. Image formats like JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP often provide better compression than PNG or JPEG, which means faster downloads and less data consumption
  Thank you - I will look into downloading something to serve my images in next gen formats. I am also now going to look into CDN. Is it best to save all my photos, pull them from the site and reupload them in the new format?
• Serve images that are appropriately-sized to save cellular data and improve load time.
• Reduce JavaScript execution time
  I have no idea what this means or how to address it?
  
• Avoid multiple page redirects
  Can anyone confirm if my site has this issue? I know I seemed to have an issue when I was trying to link my site here that is said it was some kind of redirect? As far as I am aware my site highperformancejunkies.com should go right to the home page. Second to that I don't believe any of my pages are a redirect?
• Enable text compression
  I will look to see if I can download a plugin to to this - thanks
• Minifying JavaScript files can reduce payload sizes and script parse time
  I have no idea what this means or how to address it?

I put my comments in red above to the suggestions - I am so beginner at this stuff and have not taken any type of coding courses so forgive my ignorance when I don't know how to address a number of the suggestions. If there is an "easy" way or step by step type way to any of the above issues please let me know.

AMP seemed to be my best solution but I can't get the menu to work in mobile. I also stopped displaying ads with AMP, but I feel like with some work I could get the ads to appear again...the menu is the killer.

 

Have you installed one of the WordPress caching plugins? They will help to speed up your website.

 

Yes - I have W3 Total Cache installed

 

Just make sure it's setup correctly and you're good to go that's all you need.