How does Google (or Bing, or DuckDuckGo, or others) calculate who should be on the first page of the search results? Technically, only the companies behind the search engines know, because they are the ones who code the complex algorithms. But in practice, it is known what best practices a website must follow in order to rank high in search results. Even Google gives courses and tutorials about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to help you stand out from the competition.
A very important factor in ranking high on Google is loading speed. If your website loads slow, you are not going to find yourself in page number 1 of Google. So, how do you make your website load fast? There is a large number of things you can do to improve the speed, but among those, 3 are the most important ones.
- Website coded efficiently. If you are the developer, you must code efficiently. If you are not the developer (for example, if you are building a website with WordPress), make sure you hire a good developer or that the tools, themes, and plugins you use are well-coded by a reputable developer or company. You will be surprised how much a poorly coded plugin can affect the loading speed.
- Hosting. Those $2/month hosting plans are attractive, huh? Well, forget about performance then. The cheapest hosting companies will make use of servers with dozens of websites in them, all of them sharing the same resources. Make sure that you got a good hosting company and never take the cheapest.
- Image optimization. Let’s see it.
Image optimization
What’s the heaviest (in terms of size) part of a website? The images. Usually more than 90% of your website size will be coming from images.
Makes sense to optimize them so you can save some time when loading the site, right? Here’s where ShortPixel Adaptive Images (SPAI) comes on the scene.
ShortPixel Adaptive Images does the following:
- Optimizes the images using ShortPixel’s optimization technology. This means compressing the images up to a 90% rate. What does it mean? It means that an image taken with a smartphone, weighing ~3MB, will “magically” weigh ~300KB. Take a look at a few examples on ShortPixel’s homepage!
- It serves the images from ShortPixel’s global CDN. It means that no matter what hosting plan you have, the images will be served by a fast and reliable server. And the images will be indexed as coming from your website.
- It serves only appropriately sized images depending on the visitor’s viewport. So, if a visitor opens your website from a smartphone, they won’t get the big image a desktop user would. Instead, they would get a resized and smaller one.
- It can serve the images in WebP format and/or AVIF. Here’s more info about WebP, and here’s more info about but in short, WebP images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs and 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images.
It’s clear that SPAI will help you with your SEO, by reducing your page size and loading speed. Google and the other search engines will notice it and bump you up in the search results.