WordCamp Philly is grateful for the support of our sponsors. Some of them are contributing blog posts on a variety of topics that members of the WordPress Community may find useful. This contribution is from Nexcess.

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As companies both large and small bring their businesses online, competition to woo and retain customers becomes an even greater priority.

From SEO to conversions, to user experience and beyond, page speed has a direct correlation to the success of every website. Developing a well thought-out site speed optimization plan is worth the effort because when done right, the actions you take can expand reach, increase click-throughs, and ultimately lead to more revenue.

Did you know that a 1 second delay in page response time can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions?

Effective website speed optimization strategies are targeted. Without a strategic plan for optimization it’s easy to get lost in the sauce. Optimizing an existing website is a huge project, so it’s best to have a plan before you begin.

Think about which pages are the most important to your site experience and focus on those as a top priority. For example, in most cases, homepages are vital. They often function as a starting point for visitors. Ensuring they load efficiently can engage a visitor when they first arrive at your site, and significantly reduce your bounce rate.

If you’re running an ecommerce store, product pages are also important. They serve as solid, bottom-of-funnel touchpoints for conversion. If they load slowly, you are going to see a higher than expected bounce rate.

Optimization should have an effect on your site as a whole. However, focusing on core pages will help you to improve specific, high-value user experiences quickly and effectively.

In this checklist, we’ll explore website optimizations that anyone can take on and provide a few actionable strategies for implementing ongoing speed improvements. This way, you’re able to create the user experience you want and drive the site growth & conversions you’re looking for.

1.Optimize Images

Web designers often create and upload image files with high resolutions which means bigger file sizes. Bigger file sizes mean longer load times. So one of the fastest (and easiest) website speed optimization techniques is image compression. As you optimize, don’t forget to keep both the size and quality of the image in mind, because if images are over-optimized, their quality suffers.

If you want to manage image files manually:

• PNG files are good for graphics and illustrations as they are designed to compress images as much as possible without quality loss.
• JPEG files are best for photographs. JPEG compression works well with complex images —  just make sure to check that they retain a suitable quality.
• Measure how much space an image requires beforehand. If it’s going to sit in a 100×100 pixel space, use a canvas of that size when building it.
• When possible, SVGs are effective for minimizing file size and maintaining quality due to being code.

Nexcess Managed WooCommerce and WordPress plans come with an image optimization plugin that automatically initiates every time you upload a new asset.

2. Simplify Web Design

When it comes to website speed optimization, less is almost always more. That being said, simple website design doesn’t mean featureless website design. It means considering carefully where you want a user to go and how you can make their journey as simple and relevant as possible.

As you simplify your website’s design, consider how you’re answering the following questions:

• What is the goal of your website? Where do you want users to land? Considering how to get them from point A to point B is critical, not only for simplifying a site, but also for optimizing the user experience.
• Are you optimizing your hero? Does it contain a static or moving image?
• Are you using keywords to drive your Google rank?
• Is the JavaScript code on your site relevant and needed?

Nexcess bundles Beaver Builder into all of our Managed WooCommerce and WordPress plans which offer an easy-to-use drag and drop page builder plus customization options.

3. Enable Caching

Caching is site speed’s silver bullet. It helps your website automatically deliver content to more users at faster speeds. It works by storing page elements on a visitor’s computer the first time they visit a site. During subsequent visits, instead of having to re-download those page elements from the server, the user will see the copy stored on their computer.

However, there are limits to what caching can do. Traditional caching only affects static elements. This includes images and some types of code. It does not help with dynamic elements like shopping carts.

As you’re considering caching tools for you website, consider the following:

• Which caching tools are available to you and which is right for your site? If you’re unsure, talk with your hosting provider.
• Should you also be caching dynamic assets? This is often a good idea for ecommerce stores. Varnish is a good option for Magento storefronts.
• Equally important as caching is the number of PHP workers supporting your site (it’s more important for ecommerce stores). Check how many your current hosting solution offers and to determine if you need to upgrade.

Our solutions come with caching options enabled and optimized by default. The Nexcess Cloud Accelerator allows our advanced Nginx caching system to be activated with one click, significantly improving website speed.

4. Explore Different Integration Options

Integrations and functionality add-ons can be just as detrimental to site speed as on-page elements. A well-executed optimization strategy considers how integrations are utilized, and whether they have been implemented appropriately.

Integrations can include plugins, extensions or add-ons, and they may live on the same server as your site, or exist in an external container.

When choosing which integrations to add to a site, consider:

• What are its resource requirements? Analytics software can be particularly resource heavy.
• Nexcess Managed WordPress and Managed WooCommerce offer plugin packages designed to improve site speed and your user’s experience.

5. Use a CDN

Have you ever visited an international site and been faced with a homepage that crawls? Chances are that the site is delivering content to you from somewhere else in the world. The time it takes to reach you causes longer load times.

The answer is to implement a CDN (Content Delivery Network). A CDN caches static elements (like images, CSS & javascript files) in locations around the world, so visitors to your site can download them from their nearest location. This can increase speed significantly.

A CDN allows for localized delivery of assets to site visitors based anywhere in the world.

Nexcess offers a CDN service with all of our hosting solutions.

When choosing a CDN, pay attention to:

• How many locations does it offer? Are they locations near your target audience?
• What bandwidth does the CDN have? If you’re unsure what you need, talk with one of our experts who can help determine what’s optimal for your business.
• Does the CDN include an SSL? An SSL certificate will help ensure  your site is secure.

And yes, the Nexcess CDN has multiple locations all around the world, has tons of bandwidth, and allows you to serve assets over SSL.

Summary

Website speed optimization is essential to delivering a user experience that keeps customers coming back to your site. There are numerous methods for optimizing a website, each of which can be adjusted to align with your core objective. Working through each method and testing your site speed is key to securing the best results.

Get started with Nexcess Managed WordPress & WooCommerce, ecommerce solutions that provide optimizations for speed by default.

WordCamp Philly is grateful for the support of our sponsors. Some of them are contributing blog posts on a variety of topics that members of the WordPress Community may find useful. This contribution is from Yoast.

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As with all writing, writing blog posts requires skill. To keep your reader interested, you should think about the structure of your piece and write appealing articles. You can help your readers grasp the core concept of a post by providing headings, subheadings and clear paragraphs. If people understand and like an article, they will be much more inclined to link, share and tweet about it – and that will increase your rankings. So, if you want to improve your rankings, improve your writing skills. Start with these tips on how to write an SEO-friendly blog post!

For some, writing for SEO purposes and writing to attract and captivate your audience could seem like two conflicting goals. I totally disagree. Indeed, if you want a readable and SEO-friendly blog post, the words you want to be found for should be in a very prominent place. But, over-using keywords severely hampers the readability of your text, which you definitely don’t want to do.

This post provides tips on writing blog posts that are both readable and SEO-friendly. These two goals should always go hand in hand.

Master SEO copywriting; write content that ranks! In our SEO copywriting training we teach you the skills you need to create copy that visitors and search engines love!

Before you start writing: keyword research

Before you can start writing, you have to do keyword research. If you want to dominate the search results, you’ll just have to figure out which words your audience actually searches for. These are the topics you should write about and the words you should use in your text.

Now, let’s start with some writing tips!

Key writing tips for good blog posts

Above all, your blog post has to be a good piece of writing! When starting a new blog post, many bloggers just start writing, typing whatever comes into their heads. While this may work for some people who have natural writing talents, others may need some help. Personally, I always follow these ‘rules’ when blogging.

1. Think before you write!

Think carefully about the message of your piece. What do you want to tell your readers or which central question do you want to answer? What’s the purpose of your article? And what do you want your readers to do at the end of the page? Write down the answers to these questions before you begin.

2. Devise a structure for your blog post

Start your post by creating a clear structure. Every post should have:

• some sort of introduction (in which you introduce your topic);
• a body (in which the main message is written);
• a conclusion (which should summarize the most important ideas or draw a conclusion).

Write down what you want to say in all three sections. You now have a kind of summary of your post. Now the real writing can begin.

3. Use paragraphs

Everybody uses paragraphs, but not everybody uses them well. Don’t start each new sentence on a new line, just because it looks nice. There should be a logical reason for starting a new paragraph. Each paragraph should have its own idea or subject. Ask yourself what the main idea of each paragraph is. You should be able to summarize that main idea in only one sentence. If you need more sentences, you simply need to use more paragraphs.

4. Use headings

Headings structure the whole page, so use them. They’re important not just for readability, but for SEO as well. Headings also help Google to grasp the main topics of a long post and therefore can help in your ranking. If you want people to find their way through your articles, you should use subheadings to lead people, help them scan your page, and clarify the structure of your articles. Make sure you use your keywords in some of the subheadings, but not in each and every one of them, as it will make the text clunky and unnatural, which will put people off reading further.

5. Use signal words

Signal words help people to scan through your text and grasp the main ideas. Let’s say, for example, that there are three reasons for people to buy your product. You should use signal words like: ‘first of all’; ‘secondly’ and ‘finally’. Also, words like ‘nevertheless’, ‘surely’ and ‘indeed’ give a clear signal to your readers. Readers will instantly get that a conclusion will follow after words like ‘consequently’, ’so’ or ‘for this reason’. Signal words are therefore very important to add structure to your text.

6. Let other people read your post

Before publishing your post, let someone else read it first. Ask them whether they understand the main concept of your post and invite them to correct any typos and grammatical errors.

7. Optimize the length of your article

Make sure your articles have a minimum of 300 words. Google likes long articles, however, if your article is too long – and not so easy to read – it might scare users away. Only try writing long articles when you know you’re a skilled writer. Check out this article if you want to know: “how long should my article be“. And don’t forget to use your focus keyphrase now and then!

8. Link to previous content

If you’ve already written content on the same topic as your current post, don’t forget to link these posts together. It will make your post stronger because you show some authority on the subject. As well as that, your link structure is also important for your Google rank. And of course, readers may be interested in reading these related posts too. If you want to read more about this you should read about internal linking for SEO.

9. Add content regularly

Regularly adding new blog posts to your website tells Google that your website is alive. If it’s not an active website, Google will crawl it less often, and this might negatively affect your rankings. But don’t just post for the sake of posting. Make sure you post high quality content: informative, well-written articles that fit people’s search intent.

10. Use our Yoast SEO plugin

The analysis tool in our Yoast SEO plugin helps you write SEO-friendly and readable blog posts. Start by choosing your focus keyword because this is the most important search term you want people to find this particular page for. Then it runs all kinds of checks to see whether your post is optimized well:

• Our plugin checks your post to see whether you have used the keyphrase in the right places, like your copy, title, meta description, alt text and URL. Yoast SEO Premium will also recognize different word forms of your keyphrase.
• It checks the readability of your text: Are your sentences or paragraphs too long? Do you use transition words?
• It checks for internal and external links and images in the article. Yoast SEO Premium even provides suggestions for links to related articles on your site.
• It calculates how often you use your keyphrase throughout your text: not enough or too often? In Premium it also checks if you’ve distributed your keyphrase or its synonyms well.
• It also checks if other pages on your website use the same focus keyword, to prevent you from competing with yourself.

If you write a relatively SEO-friendly blog post (based on the aspects discussed above) the plugin will indicate this with a green bullet. Pages with green bullets will help you improve the ranking of the pages on your website.

Note that not every dot has to be green for the overall SEO score to be “good”. For instance, these are the results of this post, which does have a “good” score:

If you want to know how to use the SEO and readability analysis of Yoast SEO exactly, read this post on how to use Yoast SEO well.

Conclusion

The days when a few SEO tricks were enough to get your website to rank well in Google are long gone. Nowadays, quality content is king. And good content also leads to more links, shares, tweets and return visitors to your website. Of course, there are always other things you can do to maximize the SEO friendliness of your post, but most importantly, just write very, very good posts! Still not sure if your blog post is ready to publish? Take a look at this checklist and make sure your good to go!

WordCamp Philly is grateful for the support of our sponsors. Some of them are contributing blog posts on a variety of topics that members of the WordPress Community may find useful. Our first contribution is from SiteGround.

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SiteGround is happy to support WC Philadelphia, albeit remotely. We are sorry this year we can’t see each other in person and participate in the awesome talks and discussions with the WordCamp Philly crowd, but at least we have a chance to keep in touch online! Hopefully, we can meet in Philly next year!

In the meantime, you can use this time to learn more about WordPress website optimization and management from the SiteGround resources:

Master your WordPress skills, websites, and business:

Growing your online business can be a challenging task, considering the vast amount of fields you need to gain expertise in to succeed. Get ready to outsmart the competition by reading our blog and reading actionable guides written by renowned experts. Visit our Business tips section on the and level up your WordPress, business, and marketing game.

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The web hosting services you choose for your website are a huge factor for your online performance. To learn more about what to look for in a quality web hosting provider, read more about our hosting features and latest developments that make the websites hosted on our platform lightning-fast, secure, and easy to manage.