- How to rank your WordPress website on Google?
WordPress is one of the easiest platforms
to optimize a website for Google rankings,
but it's also the easiest to mess up
if you don't know the basics.
There's a huge amount of good SEO plugins to use
and a lot of them are free.
But if you got a slow, low performing WordPress site,
that's not that good,
and we're going to fix that.
So how do you go about keeping your site performance
at decent levels and still manage to optimize for SEO?
Before I give you an answer to that,
let me tell you about my experience with WordPress.
My website, as you probably can guess by this video
is powered by WordPress and I couldn't be happier with that.
I'm attracting roughly 2.2 million visitors a month
just to my blog alone.
My tool Ubersuggest gets even more traffic.
And that's just directly from Google.
That's not even my total visits.
That's just my Google traffic.
But look, if there's one thing I take more seriously
than doing SEO self, its optimizing my site's performance
and you'll understand why in a moment,
because that's so important.
I'm going to break down this video into two sections.
One, about what you can do that is strictly SEO
and the other
about how you can optimize your site's performance.
So let's talk about site's performance.
The first thing you need to keep in mind
is no one will stick around for many seconds
if you're unable to just get your page to load.
I hate it when I'm on a website and it's like loading,
loading, loading, loading.
It's like, yeah, get out of here. Let me go to another site.
And here's the thing,
Google cares about what makes users happy.
As long as people find relevant results
in their Google searches, and then they get what they want
from the pages they see on Google,
it's all good for Google.
Google wants to make sure that whatever appears
in the search results is going to create a nice
positive experience for users so at the end of the day
they'll smile.
And then they'll keep coming back
and then clicking on those ads, which makes Google money.
So, if someone clicks on your website from Google,
their search results,
and they have to wait five or eight seconds to load,
that creates friction.
For that reason, you'll have a hard time ranking any website
that is slow or has less than ideal user experience.
That's why I have a few tactics and plugins
that I used to help speed up my site.
When it comes to who you're hosting with,
make sure your website is on a fast
server.
You'll want either a dedicated server
or managed WordPress hosting solution.
A dedicated server gives you complete dedicated resources
in terms of computer power and network bandwidth.
That means you're not competing
with many other websites that are hosted
on the same server for that CPU and memory usage.
So, your performance will be much higher
than websites hosted on a shared server.
And I'm talking about five, 10 seconds faster
depending on the server that you're talking about.
That's huge.
Now you haven't even touched plugins yet.
Add that on,
you can even speed up your site even more.
And it doesn't matter what server you have,
plugins really, really help.
The same goes with manage WordPress hosting.
When you host your website with manage web hosting services,
you have the infrastructure
that's designed for maximum performance
for your WordPress site.
They don't focus on all the technical aspects involved
in hosting and maintaining your site.
So you don't have to worry about anything.
Just look at companies like DreamHost.
They'll optimize, they'll move things around,
they'll do their technical voodoo
to make sure that your site loads fast.
They spend a lot of their time
taking care of serving performance,
so the difference in performance is also a big deal.
Now whether you're looking for dedicated server
managed hosting, let's say
whether it's DreamHost or WP Engine
or whatever you decide to use,
you want to check them out but you also want to make sure
that you use a few specific plugins
and I'm going to break down some of these plugins
that will help you out with your performance.
First, Cache and CDN.
Cache just make sure that the same page
doesn't have to keep loading for new users
and CDN is a content delivery network that puts your files
and, you know, for your website all over the world
whether it's India or Australia or UK.
So no matter where people come and visit your site from,
it loads fast.
Then another plugin I love is Lazy loading.
This way if you have tons of images or video on a page
when people scroll, you won't load up all the images.
You'll wait until they scroll and then load up the images
because right when someone loads your website,
why would you load up on hundred images?
They haven't even seen all hundred yet.
Let them see a few and then load it more.
Creates a much faster user experience.
And there's one plugin that'll help you with all these three
that I mentioned.
Cache, CDN and Lazy loading.
It's called W3 Total Cache.
And best all, you can use it for free.
Another thing, image compression.
If you have heavy images that are large in fall size,
image compression will solve that.
Still make the images look beautiful and crisp
but they load super quickly.
A cool plugin that does it for free,
at least till certain limit is Smush.it.
So check that out.
And I'm considering launching a WordPress SEO plugin
that does image compression
and automates a few other SEO tasks for you.
And if that's something that you like to check out,
just leave a comment below and let me know you want it,
cause if enough of you say it,
I'll go and create a free plugin.
Now
let's talk about the plugins that you need to use
in order to optimize your SEO.
With SEO, there's really just a basic foundation
that you need to focus on,
and there's a lot of good plugins to help you.
Before you make a decision
as to which plugin you'll end up using,
let me break down a few things
that are important for you to consider.
Fist, Sitemap.
You got to make sure the searches can crawl your whole site,
site maps help.
Then you got basic on-page SEO.
You want to make sure things are bundle up.
Image SEO.
There's structured markup.
You got to make sure that you're controlling the robots
as well,
whether it's redirect or excluding certain pages or files.
Any plugin that gives you access to these capabilities
will be a good fit for a WordPress site.
But you're probably looking for specific recommendations.
You're like, "Neil, that's a generic list.
What one should I use?"
Well, I would look into any one of these three options
as they're great.
Rank Math, Yoast, and all-in-one SEO.
Check out those three.