When you launch a website, you want it to be visible on search engine results pages or have a good SEO ranking. While there are many factors that can help you achieve this, there are some vital aspects like site speed and user experience that require special attention to create a successful website. Even when you are comparing web hosting services to find one for your site, a clear focus on these vital aspects can help you choose the best option. Whether you opt for Shared Hosting, VPS Servers, Dedicated Servers, or Cloud Web Hosting, it is important to make sure that the features and resources allow your site to perform optimally. Today, we are going to talk about these vital aspects and share five ways that can help you improve them.
1. Choose the right hosting service
Your website resides on the webserver. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the server has a fast response time. This will depend on the kind of website that you want to launch. Typically, static websites load faster than dynamic ones. If you have a dynamic site, then you need to carefully assess its hosting resource requirements and choose a plan accordingly. While Cloud Hosting services are popular among most websites today, there are many variants available like SSD Cloud Hosting, unmanaged/Managed Cloud Server Hosting, Windows/Linux Cloud Hosting solutions, etc. Research your options and choose carefully.
You can check out the following video to understand what SSD-based Cloud Hosting is:
2. Image Optimization
Even if you are using SSD Cloud Hosting that is designed for maximum speed and performance, there are some steps you can take to boost it further. One of the oldest yet most effective ways of doing this is by optimizing all the images on your site for the web. Even one image that is not optimized can impact the loading time and performance of your site. There are various tools that can help you with image optimization (both free and premium). You can also consider using modern image formats that are designed to help you upload high-resolution images at a fraction of their size.
3. Low CLS score
CLS or Cumulative Layout Shift is a core web vital according to the Google search engine. In the simplest terms, it is a measure of how stable your webpage is when it loads. So, if you have a website with elements that shift a lot during the loading process, then it has a high CLS score which is bad for users. To reduce this, you can set the dimensions in CSS for images, GIFs, videos, etc. This can help you reserve space for the media file on the webpage even if it takes time to load.
4. Inline critical CSS in your site’s code
Typically, when a site loads, the browser renders HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. based on the design of the site. Since CSS loads after HTML, the user might have to wait a while before something appears on the screen. To avoid this, you can remove the part of CSS that appears above the fold and inline it in your site’s code. This way, you will be able to make your site appear faster, leading to a better user experience.
5. Third-party scripts
A website can use various third-party scripts for different reasons. Being third-party, you have no control over their performance. However, since these scripts are embedded on your webpages, they impact your site’s performance. Therefore, if you find that a particular script is slowing down your site, then start looking for options or try hosting it yourself. You must also ensure that you load them asynchronously to allow the browser to load your content before running the third-party script.
Summing Up
In May 2021, Google is expected to launch page experience in website rankings. This will bring site speed and user experience to the fore and use Core Web Vitals with the existing factors to determine the rank of a website on the results pages. The tips mentioned above can help you improve these scores and help you boost your SEO ranking. Good Luck!
