With each passing year, search engines become pickier and crankier. The demand for rigorous standards to be met increases as a result of competition; with so many websites vying for a place at the top of search engines results, only the ones that provide the best visitor experience can make the cut. Despite all of the impressive SEO efforts you may have implemented, your site may still find itself under-performing. If your site is slow to load, then this is a huge problem that hinders your overall objective. The trend toward mobile devices is only accelerating the need for faster and faster page load times; we will discuss three basic things you can do today to improve slow-loading pages and slice seconds off of your loading times.

WP Super Cache

Hopefully, you are using WordPress to get the most out of pinging your website to search engines and maximizing SEO efforts (if not, consider converting so this tip can be of assistance). WP Super Cache is a great plugin that can take all of the difficult work that comes with caching off of your hands, turning it into a very simple process. The main way this works is that it creates HTML renditions of files that are traditionally executed in PHP; where applicable, this can drastically reduce file sizes displayed on the user’s end and allow your site to load much quicker. Those who suffered from eight to ten-second loading times saw up to two seconds sliced off of their page load times by using this one simple trick.

New Web Hosting

Whether you realize it or not, your current web host may be playing a huge role in your page loading speeds. While almost every web hosting provider will claim that they are the best (or good enough, at the very least), unbiased reviews of all the major hosting providers can be found online for you to peruse. It is important to pick a web hosting provider that puts speed ahead of profit; don’t be surprised if better, faster web hosting plans are a bit more expensive than what you may currently have. Nevertheless, with search engines essentially penalizing websites that load slowly, you can’t afford to skimp on speed.

Image Considerations

Whenever you are pinging your website to search engines, you optimize the content so that search engines can index it effectively. Do you optimize your images so people can view them effectively? When it comes to page loading times, images and file sizes can play a huge role in that. Rather than uploading large images and scaling them down, rescale the photos beforehand so that the size of the file is smaller. You can also download one of several photo optimization programs that can take a .png or .jpg file and further reduce the file size by up to 30% with no compromise in quality to the image. Another simple solution (just in case some are still using it) is to eliminate the use of .bmp files from your website, and host any videos via YouTube instead of having them hosted locally.