Today’s tips are on how to speed up your site and how to make Google fetch your website.
Site speed is hugely important. Users expect sites to load super fast and if they don’t then they are very likely to just close out and go somewhere else.
Amazon even conducted a study that concluded how only one second in load speed could cost them $1.6 billion in sales.
So it is safe to say that you want to have the fastest site possible.
And after you make all these changes I’ll show you how to tell Google to take another look at your site.
#1 PageSpeed Insights
Straight from the horse’s mouth.
Google created their PageSpeed Insights tool so that website owners would be able to see what is causing their sites to load slowly.
All you have to do is put in your website, or any specific page and then click analyze and Google will take a look at the page and let you know all the things that are slowing down your site.
Some common errors are…
- Optimized images — means that you need to compress or resize the images on your site
- Reduce server response time — means that you might need to upgrade your hosting account
- Leverage browser caching — means that you should use a caching plugin on your site
There are many more errors that might come up. Some of them are easy to fix, and some you might need to get help from your web developer to really fix them.
While a perfect 100 score is nearly impossible you should aim to get the highest score you can reasonably achieve.
I would recommend optimizing your images first as that will give you the largest gain in site speed as well as the easiest to accomplish.
#2 Fetch as Google
Now that you have made a bunch of changes to your site, making it faster and improving your user experience how do you go about letting Google know that?
Well, there is another Google tool to the rescue!
In Google Search Console under the Crawl menu is “Fetch as Google“. From there put in the page that you made changes on, or if it was the whole site then just leave the URL blank. Click the “Fetch and Render” button.
It will take a little bit for Google to generate the render of the page, but once it does you can click the “Request indexing” button to submit the page to Google. If the changes you made were site-wide then select the “Crawl this URL and its direct links” but if not then just select “Crawl only this URL” and finally click Go.
After that Google will crawl your site and update their index. If you did everything right then your site should start to rank higher in Google Search.
Note: you can also use this tool whenever you create a new page that you want Google to index very quickly.
Before you go…
This Thursday is the first workshop in my series on Google Analytics.
This 4 section workshop series will teach you…
- who your visitors are,
- where they’re coming from,
- and how they are engaging with your site.
Go from a beginner in Google Analytics to someone who is confident in their website’s data collection and analytics.
You can take all 4, or pick and choose which workshops you want to attend.
Also as a special bonus… Get 1 hour of consulting, a $150 value, with me if you attend all 4 workshops and ½ hour of consulting if you attend 3 workshops.
So if you really want to understand your website’s data and be able to make informed decisions register for my workshop series.
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