I use a ton of different tools and plugins to make sure my website is always on top. I will show you 5 tools to optimise your website. It’s very important to focus on this, if not, then you’re losing out on a lot of revenue within your visitors. For every second your website loads, the bigger the chance is for the visitor or potential customer is leaving your website.
Today everything is so fast, and time is money, so if people need to wait much longer than 2-3 seconds on a website loading, they’re off to the next. You might have the service or product they need, but they’re not going to wait around for your website to load. I will show you a tool that can help you optimise your websites loading time.
Next thing is you need to be found, and there are endless ways of doing this. You can do paid advertising, you can make content, do guerrilla marketing and so much more. I’ll share with you how you with installing a plugin can get very far in increasing your presence on Google.
You don’t need to use all of these tools, and some of the tools might not even work with your website. I do recommend you find a replacement for the tool as it will help you in any possible angle, with minimal effort. With that said, let’s just dig right into it.
What does it mean for conversions, SEO and visitors?
Tools
Tool 1: GTMetrix
GTMetrix is a tool that can help tell you what is wrong with your website. What your loading speed is and more. This is an awesome tool to optimise your website.
It’s very simple to use, you just head over to GTMetrix, enter your URL, and wait for your turn. After some seconds you’ll receive a report with tasks, and then you just need to solve every single issue. After you’ve resolved these you can run it again and you should see an increase in grade and a decrease in loading time.
GTMetrix measures on a ton of different metrics. I’ll dig into them briefly.
Metrics GTMetrix check
Images: It checks all of your images, whether they are optimised, or they are too big and suggest down to every single image what you need to do. And often they even optimise the image for you, so you just need to download it and replace it.
Caching: It checks whether you use caching or not and if you’re using gzip compression to compress your website even more. You will often experience issues in this category with third-party URLs. There isn’t anything you can do, only optimise everything else.
Javascript: This is a bit nerdy, but it checks if all of your javascript code has been minified and combined into one file.
CSS: Same deal as javascript, it checks whether all your CSS code has been minified and combined into one file.
Request: It checks all your requests through. A request is when your website needs something, it can be a design file, a coding file or something third. If you make too many requests it can increase your loading speed, so you want to keep it at a minimum.
I ran my website through GTMetrix, and as you can see I need to work on my images:
Tool 2: SEO Tool
To be present on Google today is so important as so many potential customers start their Internet journey through Google. Try to look at yourself, if you need an answer, a product, even a new TV – What do you do? – You go to Google and search for the answer.
SEO is a huge subject, and I’m only touching it briefly, I will dig more into it in the future. For now, I will just show you 2 simple tools you can use to increase your presence on Google.
Tool 2.1: Yoast SEO
This is a plugin to WordPress, so if you don’t use WordPress, I suggest you find a replacement plugin that fit’s your websites system.
Even though WordPress is extremely SEO optimised, to begin with, Yoast takes it an extra notch up. It helps you both within your content writing, but also in the technical part. It makes it possible for you to write meta descriptions and title for each of your websites in an elegant way and with all its different features you’re never left alone. Yoast guides you through the whole process, once you start using it, you’ll never go back.
Tool 2.2: Woorank
Woorank is a free website, which analyses your website in terms of SEO. It checks on numerous different parameters to tell you what you’re doing great and what you need to work on. You get actionable tasks you can solve right away, and it will all help you to increase your presence on Google. The better technical SEO, the higher you rank. Of course, there are 200+ other parameters Google look at, then they crawl your website.
I ran my website through the analyser, and as you can see I have a lot I need to work on. This is totally free and gives you a perfect idea of what to work on.
Tool 3: Cache Tool
A cache tool is a perfect way to optimise your website, in terms of loading speed.
Imagine you’re going to a website, as soon as you hit their URL and press enter, they start collecting the resources from all over the server and third-party servers and more. This is a website without caching.
Imagine another website, you go to the website and you immediately see the website fully loaded, these probably use cache. The cache is used everywhere on the web, and what it basically does is that it saves a version of your website in the short-term memory. When you go to the website it has everything collected, and it doesn’t need to reach far for the content.
To achieve this in WordPress, my favourite go-to tool is WP Fastest Cache, they have both a free version and a paid version. Just by using the free version you get very far in terms of benefitting from the caching. It’s so easy to use, you just tick off the boxes where you need the functionality. After this, the plugin will take care of the rest. This is a must for every website out there.
Tool 4: SSL
You have probably hurt it a million times, or read it, so I won’t go in dept with this, just mention it. SSL is a must, you can’t have a website in 2020 without SSL installed. A quick tip, whatever hosting service you’re using there is always a free SSL certificate, just ask for: Let’s encrypt. It works in all browsers and cost you nothing. Your hosting makes sure the certificate is updated forever. Contact your host and get an SSL certificate today!
Tool 5: CDN
A CDN(Content Delivery Network), is perfect for websites with a target group worldwide. To explain it in the most simple way, you have to imagine this. With a CDN your website is “placed” on servers all around the world. So when a visitor goes to the website the CDN is “activated” and it finds the closest server of the visitor. From here it requests the website from that server and shows to the visitor.
If you don’t have a CDN, your website will always be requested from the same server. So if your server is placed in Germany, and a person from Australia goes to your website, it takes much more time to load the website. Compared to if a person from Germany accessed it.
If you’re using WordPress, you can use the free plugin Jetpack, they have a built-in CDN which will get you started. Another free alternative which works with all website types is Cloudflare.
If you want a more extensive CDN to use, I recommend using KeyCDN, it’s very simple and cost-effective CDN to optimise your website.
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Conclusion
To sum everything up I’ve now given you a ton of different tools you can start using today. All tools are free of charge, so there are no excuses for not taking advantage of them. The longer you wait the more visitors, customers and revenue you lose.
I will recommend you starting with the technical parts as they are all the groundwork for when you start to market yourself and your website. If you start creating content without a fully-optimised website it can hurt you in the end.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out or leave a comment below.
FAQ
How do I optimise my website for search engines?
You should take a look at Woorank or Yoast SEO. It helps you in so many ways optimising your website for search engines, and the best of it all is that it’s 100% free.
How do I optimise my website for Google?
You should make sure your technical SEO is in the top, use a tool to check this. Second, you need to provide content for Google. Great content ranks high. So quality is way above quantitative here.
Can I do SEO on my own?
Yes you can. I always say that SEO contains of 2 parts, the technical part and the content part. When your technical part is aligned, then your content will rise up through Google.
