Technical SEO Checklist for WordPress Website Optimization

WordPress is the most popular tool for creating blogs and websites. It is an easier and faster way to create a website in any style even if you are a beginner.

Most people prefer to use WordPress to other Content Management System(CMS) tools because WordPress is SEO-friendly. This does not mean that WordPress is a replacement for SEO. No. WordPress makes things easier but you will still have to implement the right SEO tactics for you to rank well on Google. Read on to find out ways that you can optimize your WordPress website to win with SEO.

1. Choose a Reliable Web Host

Your web hosting has a direct impact on your site speed, security, and uptime. Low site speed will affect the performance of your website. Poor security and uptime will both affect the quality of your site. Make sure you choose a good and reliable web hosting provider to avoid this. Although a good host is more expensive in the beginning, it will save you both time and money in the end.

If you are on shared hosting, make sure you move to private hosting. Though it is cheap, shared hosting will slow your website down and reduce the performance of your website. A private host on the other hand is faster and is customized to suit your needs.

2. Choose Your WordPress Theme Wisely

When you install WordPress, you will see the default theme known as ‘Twenty-Twenty.’ If you do not like it, there are many WordPress themes you can choose from. Both free and premium WordPress themes are available in the market. Whatever your choice is, make sure that you choose an SEO-friendly theme. Most themes will claim to be SEO-friendly but some will come with unnecessary scripts and plugins that can slow down your website’s performance.

Look for a lightweight theme, with useful features to you and one that allows you to disable features you do not need. Also, remember to test the theme using Google’s web.dev tool to find out its performance and any SEO issues before you install it.

3. Optimize WordPress Plugins

After you install a theme, you need to install a WordPress plugin. Both free and premium plugins are available. However, Yoast is the most popular one.

Make no mistake, a plugin is not meant to optimize your website. It is only meant to help you do so. To install a WordPress plugin:

• Log in to the admin panel
• Go to the left-hand menu at the bottom of the page and click plugin and select the ‘Add new’ option.
• Look for the plugin you want and install
• Activate the plugin

Another thing you need to know is that WordPress has so many good plugins. However, not all good plugins will work well together. Some of them are so clunky and will use up a lot of your memory. You will have to test each plugin to find the one that works best for you.

4. Optimize Images

If your website is slow, the first thing you will think about is the images. The use of images is one of the best ways to make your website attractive. But if the images are large, then they will slow down your website’s loading speed. This will result in a high bounce rate on your website.

To fix this, you need to reduce the size of your images while maintaining their quality. Luckily tools you can use to automatically optimize your images are readily available. Examples of such tools include ShortPixel, TinyPNG, and Smush Image Compression Plugin on WordPress.

5. Track Your Website’s Traffic

Generating traffic to your website is important but it is equally important to understand how your traffic is interacting with your website. This is the point where web analytics comes into play. Web analytics will help you understand your customers and potential customer’s interactions with your site. As a reward, this will help you identify areas you need to focus on to give your users a better experience. With a web analytic tool

• You can study your customer’s trends in economic influence, seasonality, etc
• You can get more info about your customers such as their location, keywords they searched, time spent on the website, if they came back to your site, etc.
• You can find out which of your pages are the most popular and what you can do to increase your conversion rate
• You can find out the places you have more customers, and find out the countries, states, or cities that you lack customers.

There are so many web analytic tools (both free and premium) available for you to use. But Google Analytics is the best. To install it, you must create a free GA account and add a GA snippet on your pages. You can also use MonsterInsights WordPress plugin as an alternative.

6. Use a Content Delivery/Distribution Network(CDN)

To deliver the content of high quality to your audience, you need to use a CDN. It is designed to improve performance by providing faster delivery of content to the users. It does this by replicating content such as images, videos, JavaScript, CSS, HTML pages, stylesheets, etc from your website and distributes it to the users through the servers near them. This helps improve the download speeds and the bounce rate on your website. It will also improve the user experience and conversion rate on your website.

Again there are many Content Distribution Networks available in the market. However, Amazon CloudFront CDN, MaxCDN, and Cloudflare are the best ones since they are easier to use. Choose the one that works best for you.

Conclusion

The SEO world is changing so fast. This is because Google is constantly trying to find ways to improve user experience on search engines. Businesses have to keep up with these changes to get to the top and stay there. This is overwhelming even to the SEO experts and can sometimes feel like a nightmare. This is why you need Joel House SEO Gold Coast to turn the nightmare into a walk in the park.