Week Eleven: Keep Page Load Time Down

Have a look at how long your pages take to load – every second could be lost visitors

1 – Compress your Images

If you have a myMA site, we’ve worked hard to make sure the site loads quickly. I discuss some of the reasons we’ve designed myMA sites the way we have here:

If you can’t watch the above video, the gist is we’ve built a light-weight system on-top of WordPress which we host on our own servers, right here in the UK. However, one of the things that slows down a lot of websites is the size of the images – and that’s out of our control. You’ll need to have a look at the images you upload to see if they’re an appropriate file size.

Web developers will edit and save images in a compressed format so that they’re smaller in file size. Small files take less time to load, which makes pages load quicker, which helps SEO.

If you don’t have access to any photo editing software, you can compress images before you upload them for free here: http://webresizer.com/resizer/

Just upload your image, then download the new smaller version (you’ll notice above that the quality looks identical) and use this compressed image whenever adding images to pages. It will be worth re-uploading any large images on your homepage, as that’s the most important page on the site and the one that you want to rank on Google. You don’t have to re-upload every image on the site, but try and look at some of your more popular pages and fix images that are slowing you down.

2 – Blog Suggestion: Benefits of Martial Arts

If you’re looking for a blog idea for this week, and you’ve not already discussed this topic before, it’s something I would suggest you write about. The content will feature a lot of great keywords – discipline, fitness, health, community – that you want your site to be associated with, and its a good article to sell your classes with. Stick to the same length – about 1000 words – and be sure to optimise any images you use before you upload them, as above.

Make a video using the same content as the blog, and publish it to your Social Media accounts. And – as always – be sure to include a clear next step people can take if they want to book a lesson with you by providing a link to your booking form or your phone number.

Week Eleven Wrap Up

This is the last week where we’ll have 2 or 3 new things to do. Next week we’re going to discuss how to keep your main content pages updated and relevant, so that you enjoy a consistent high ranking in Google and don’t start to slip down the rankings.