User experience has become one of the most important elements when it comes to positioning a website in search engines. Although multiple factors can play a role in web positioning, the WPO is one of the main ones.
In this article, we will see 9 practical tips on WPO from Romuald Fons so that you can optimize your website to the maximum. But first, we’ll briefly review what the foundation of the WPO is: Google’s Core Web Vitals.
What is WPO?
WPO (Website Performance Optimization) refers to a series of optimizations that make the loading speed of a website faster and, as a consequence, improve the user experience.
What are Core Web Vitals?
The are the indicators that Google uses to measure the interaction of users with websites. There are three main metrics that evaluate a user’s experience on a web page, regardless of its content.
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): The time it takes to load and render the largest element visible in the section above the fold. This metric measures the loading time of the page content.
- FID (First Input Delay): The time it takes for the website to respond to the first user interaction. Measure the interactivity of the page.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): the frequency in which unexpected changes occur in the elements of the design. This metric measures the visual stability of the page.
To find out how well your website responds to these metrics, Google offers the tool . There you can enter your domain and see an overall score with a breakdown of each metric. Using this tool allows you to see what aspects of the user experience you need to improve in order to score higher and offer a better web experience to your users.
Knowing the Core Web Vitals is central to the WPO, since it is based on Google metrics. We will see below 9 WPO tips suggested by Romuald Fons to optimize and improve the overall experience of your site.
9 practical tips from Romuald Fons on WPO
1. Use a hosting with SSD disks
The is the first element that influences the of your website. It is important to have a high performance and high speed service for your sites. For this reason, we advise you to choose a hosting that has SSD disks.
SSD it is a more modern storage technology than the previous HDD. Its main advantage is speed, as it works about 15 times faster than HDD. In addition, it has higher durability, fewer errors, and consumes less power.
At , we offer different SSD storage options depending on the plan. For example, our plan Hosting Premium have 100GB and the plan Business Hosting, 200GB. On the other hand, ours can go up to 250 GB. This is the amount of space allocated on SSD drives. We recommend choosing the plan based on the needs of your web project.
2. Use a version higher than PHP 7
Another important aspect to consider when choosing hosting is the version of , the programming language used for web development. We recommend using versions higher than PHP 7, preferably 8.
The latest versions offer higher performance and lower RAM consumption. In addition, having the latest possible version is safer since the previous ones become outdated over time. You’ll also experience fewer system crashes in the event of errors.
You may not always be able to update to the latest version. In that case, try the immediately previous one, until you find the one that works and is more recent.
The have multiple versions of PHP, from 5.2 until 8.0so you can have updated PHP for your sites without problems.
3. Purchase an SSL certificate
In the initial configuration of a website, in addition to the hosting and the , it is essential to have a . SSL is a security protocol that creates encrypted communication between the server and the web browser, protecting data and making your website more secure.
Today, Google takes into account that websites have SSL certificates and, if they do not have them, marks them as not secure. Therefore, in addition to providing greater security, this certificate generates more confidence for Google and the users who enter your site.
they have free unlimited SSL, which can be activated with a few clicks.
4. Use a VPS server
Among the options of , we recommend you to choose a server , since it is more secure and stable than a . These are some of the main differences between the different types of hosting:
- : Multiple websites are hosted on the same server and share resources. Its plans are among the most affordable and it is the most popular among personal or small business websites.
- – You get dedicated resources from a network of servers that ensure maximum performance and uptime. You don’t share resources with other websites like with shared hosting and, unlike VPS, it doesn’t require technical knowledge.
- : You get the dedicated resources of the virtual partition of a server. You don’t have to share resources and you have root access, giving you the freedom to manage your hosting. It is intended for experts or for those who already have technical knowledge.
pro tips
To improve the speed of your VPS Hosting, you can use HTTP/2 instead of HTTP.
5. Use CDNs
The (Content Delivery Network) or content distribution network serves to accelerate the delivery of information allowing users to access the web from the closest geographical area. In this way, it improves the loading speed of the website.
Some hosting plans have a free CDN. However, if your server does not have a CDN, you can use CloudFlare, which has a free version.
Setting up is very simple. You just have to create an account, register your domain and change the assigned DNS. If you want to know more, you can read this detailed tutorial on .
6. Install a web optimization plugin
To improve the web optimization of your site, you can help yourself with a plugin. If you use WordPress, these are some of the ones we recommend:
- : Set your website to automatically work with HTTPS.
- : Automatically finds and replaces database URLs. With this plugin, all internal links will point to the HTTPS version as well.
- : minifies, compresses and caches the HTML, CSS and JS in the browser.
- : cache your site, clean the database and compress the images.
- – Optimizes performance and improves the loading speed of comments.
- : preloads the URLs to which your web page is pointing, making navigation more agile.
- : Allows you to limit or stop WordPress Heartbeat API activity.
- : locally hosts the Google Analytics Javascript.
- – Replaces embedded videos with a preview image, improving page load time.
Note that it is not necessary to install all the mentioned plugins, but only those that you need.
7. Optimize images
Images are one of the elements with the greatest weight on a website and, therefore, one of the main causes of slow loading. To improve loading time, it is necessary to . There are several actions you can take for this.
Use the WEBP format
The first thing is to use the WEBP format, since in most cases it is the most optimal for the web. Since version 5.8 of WordPress, this format is already supported by the CMS.
Use Lazy Loading
What Lazy Loading does is delay the loading of the elements of your website, in this case, the images, until the moment they are used. In this way, you avoid preloading images that are not going to be seen.
For this, you can add simple code to your images or use a plugin, such as from WP Rocket. Both Google Chrome and WordPress have Lazy Load natively.
Compress the images
You can also compress the size of images and reduce the weight of your files. The plugin will serve you for this. You can activate an option that allows you to compress the images directly when you upload them.
Carrying out all these actions on your website will allow you to increase your PageSpeed Insights score and improve the user experience.
8. Avoid using widgets for social networks or maps
You may want to add a section of your social network or the location of your business to your website to make it more attractive. While WordPress allows these options, be aware that they can affect the health of your site.
Social media widgets like Facebook and Twitter, as well as Google Maps, consume a lot of resources. This makes your page load much slower and affects your Core Web Vitals.
9. Uninstall the plugins you don’t use and update the ones you do use
There is a huge amount that you can use on your website, either to add functionality or improve the WPO. Either way, remember to limit the amount to a minimum. Only keep the necessary ones active and delete the ones you don’t use.
Also, it is important to update your plugins regularly and make sure they are compatible with the latest versions of WordPress. If you install a plugin that has not been updated for a long time, it can represent a security breach for your website.
final words
The WPO is a central aspect for every website builder. Whether you have your own site or create pages for others, you want Google to show you within the first search results.
The time it takes to load a page, the interactivity of the users and the visual stability of the site are some of the factors that Google takes into account when evaluating which sites to rank first. That’s why it’s important to constantly perform web optimization on your site and keep your PageSpeed scores high.
If your website loads fast and is easy for visitors to navigate, you have laid a very important foundation on your website and you only have to focus on creating good content and offering good services or products. The WPO is not definitive, but it is one of the pillars of website management.
To improve the WPO, we have given you some tips from Romuald Fons. We review them below:
- Choose a hosting service with SSD Disks
- Use a version greater than PHP 7
- Get an SSL certificate
- Use a VPS server
- Use CDN
- Install a web optimization plugin
- Optimize images
- Avoid widgets for social networks or maps
- Uninstall the plugins you don’t use and update the ones you do use
We hope that these tips have been helpful for you to take the WPO of your website to the fullest. We invite you to leave us your doubts or recommendations in comments. Good luck!
Betania is a copywriter with a passion for digital marketing and website creation. She writes tutorials and performs SEO analysis on ‘s Content team. In her free time, she enjoys dancing, singing or watching a good classic movie.
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