WordPress Website Optimization: 16 steps and tips to improve your site

Are you looking to start creating a website and thinking about choosing the WordPress platform to build your website on? So you are here in the right place.. We will show you a comprehensive guide on how to create an integrated WordPress website and the most important standards and guidelines that you must consider to prepare your WordPress website to appear in search results.

Currently, WordPress is considered one of the best and most high-quality platforms on which we advise you to build your website, because it has complete customization mechanisms and can be dealt with very simply. It is also safe and free of the archiving problems that many users of other platforms face.

In this guide, we will focus on providing as many methods as possible that will achieve impressive results and make your site built on WordPress fully prepared according to all recognized standards to benefit from appearing in the first ranks on search engines.

More details about the WordPress platform

The WordPress.org platform is considered a control panel that is mainly used to create, update, and improve your blog. What is unique about this platform is that you do not have to write any codes or programming codes to create a website or blog. This system is open source and trusted by developers located all over the world.

Many people prefer to take advantage of this platform. WordPress is certainly now the most popular content management system, and what makes it superior to other competitors is its open source nature.

Anyone who has experience in coding and working with code can easily edit and make certain changes to a specific part of the website. However, this does not mean that you have to be an expert in programming to achieve success while working on this platform. You can do this easily even if you lack coding knowledge.

Another great thing to note is that WordPress is good for SEO. Therefore, if you intend in the future to start an online business, using this platform will be beneficial to grow your project and obtain a large amount of visits to further enhance your sales and ultimately obtain higher revenues.

WordPress can also cover many SEO tasks including meta tags, URL keyword integration, content structuring, and much more... Not only that, WordPress offers full support and fast mobile integration.

Below, we will take a look at some WordPress tips and best practices that will definitely prove to be very useful for you.

The most important tips and instructions that must be followed in order to build an SEO-friendly WordPress website

1. Choose a template that is compatible with SEO

When setting up your WordPress site, you will need to select a skin to work with. If your primary goal is to attract traffic to your site it is extremely important that you look for a theme that is consistent with SEO standards.

These are examples of some best platforms where you can find professional WordPress templates:

1. Picalica.
2. Khamsat.
3. Kafiil.

Many times we find that WordPress themes are paid and expensive. Fortunately, there are a large number of free themes automatically available to choose from.

If you have already installed a free WordPress theme but are not receiving enough traffic to your website, it is time to change your current theme and turn it into a professional one that is well built and compatible with what SEO requires.

2. Top-Level Domain (TLD) Mapping

You will need to specify a domain (URL) to continue setting up your WordPress site.

https://www.example.com Either or both should be https://example.com SEO-friendly whether you use www initially or not.

All you need is to make sure that your website can be accessed through the type of domain you have chosen. If you choose, www.example.com you will need to adjust the redirection from example.com one to the other. This depends on your preferences and what you choose. After that, your domain will be ready for use.

But, you must be very careful. If you are thinking of replacing any current website and merging it with another one you own... in such cases, you will necessarily need both to have the same structure (both with or without www). Otherwise there will be a problem when trying to redirect one to the other, and it will cause more headaches such as loss of archiving and ranking in search results.

Examples of the best hosts that provide the service of purchasing a paid domain at reasonable prices:

1. Goddady.com.
2. Namesheap.com.
3. Domain.com.

3. Optimize your website

Another important thing is to optimize your site to appear on search engines. In this regard, you can take advantage of the WordPress theme editor to update your website's meta description, title, target keywords, and more.

If you install the right SEO-friendly themes on your website, this will greatly benefit you in determining what appears on Google when someone searches for your site or similar services or products your business provides.

You can also use some auxiliary programs for this purpose. Yoast SEO is one of the best plugins that you can use to edit titles and meta descriptions.

4. Choose a high-quality hosting service

You necessarily need to choose a decent hosting service if you want to achieve the best results. Fortunately, there are many great web hosts you can choose from, including:

1. GoDaddy Hosting.
2. Hostgator Hosting.
3. Bluehost Hosting.
4. WP Engine Hosting.
5. Hostinger Hosting.

5. Increase the speed of your website

Website speed is an important part of any good browsing experience. If you want to improve your website's ranking to the top of search results then you must necessarily focus on this aspect.

Slow loading web pages causes people to bounce from your website, which signals to search algorithms that this site provides a poor user experience, resulting in a lower ranking of your site on Google search. So, all you need to do is make sure that your site loads quickly.

Fortunately, many modern WordPress hosting platforms are fast enough to host most simple websites.

Some of the best ways to increase your website speed include installing a lazy loading ad plugin , leveraging a CDN ( Cloudflare ), compressing your images, etc.

Most hosting services offer a maximum number of visitors they can handle based on the package and price you pay. If you still find that your website is very slow, it is likely time to upgrade your web hosting plan.

6. Make your website responsive

If you do not optimize your website for mobile devices, you are missing out on a large number of potential visitors every day. Therefore, it is very important that you take this aspect seriously, if you want to get the most out of it. In such cases, you should look for a website design that is fully optimized for mobile use and browsing.

Currently, smartphone users make up the vast majority of visitors arriving via Google search. So, Google algorithms nowadays use “mobile-first indexing” while indexing your posts as well as for page ranking. This means that you should necessarily check the loading speed of your website on mobile, so that it becomes easier for mobile users to read and navigate.

According to Google's recommended website building guidelines, your website should be responsive which means it perfectly adapts to all screen sizes and sizes including smartphones, tablets and desktops.

Use these web tools to make sure your website is responsive to different screen sizes:

1. Mobile test website to test responsiveness with mobile devices.
2. What Is My Screen Resolution website for checking responsiveness to different screen sizes.
3. Responsinator website to ensure that the theme is responsive to all devices

7. Take advantage of WordPress title suggestions

WordPress gives you heading suggestions that let you know if you're using the correct heading hierarchy. Proper hierarchy will greatly help your website in terms of SEO. Another important thing is to write titles that are keyword-rich, interesting and clear to the readers.

Headings or subheadings and secondary headings are basically headings written at the beginning of sections before paragraphs. Depending on the importance of the title as well as its location in the middle of the post, they vary specifically in size. While writing content for SEO, you should incorporate the keywords you want to appear for into your titles.

Search engines mainly use titles to identify the following:

• Keywords and related words must necessarily be included in the main headings and sub-headings of the page that include H1_ and H2_.
• Secondary subheadings in the topic reflect more detail than the main headings, which include H3_, H4_, and H5_.
• Page Content on Google Search suggests subheadings that include paragraph text.
• Always make use of H2s for writing important topics while use H3s for lists as well as smaller topics.

8. Make sure you do best practices for image compression

When you are dealing with your WordPress SEO, it is very important to pay attention to the size of images. There are some important tips to follow while downsizing your images for SEO, which include the following:

1. Make sure to compress your images to a light size with the .webp extension, because this will help you increase the speed of opening the site.
2. Design your own photos and avoid using others' photos. Mostly, these images are protected by copyright.
3. Consider adding image titles and alt text as well as captions that help Google know what your images are about and how they relate to your keyword.

Use these free sites to compress images and convert their format to webp:

Website: Compress Img
Tool: Squoosh App

9. Prioritize great user experience or UX

User Experience and User Interface Design have a significant impact on search engine optimization. If your website doesn't have a great user experience, people won't want to use your website again, no matter how good the services, products, or information you provide are.

You must necessarily have a good user interface to provide a good impression on users. Always ensure that the UI design of your website is functional, clean and bug-free to improve the value of your website.

10. Speed up the content creation process

Crafting consistent content is a very important strategy if you are looking to have a strong online presence. If your main goal is to increase your website's SEO score, or bring in a lot of visitors to increase your Google AdSense earnings rate, there is no better way than producing unique, high-quality daily posts on a regular basis.

This means that you should always come up with keywords and topics that are relevant to your audience, produce blog content that is useful to the visitor, your marketing program, etc. One of the best ways to speed up the content creation process is to outsource a blog writing service.

11. Use Google Search Console

Google Search Console is one of the most important things you will need to boost your website's performance. This analytics tool from Google helps you get a good understanding of the visitors you receive on your site, performance, number of clicks, ranks in which your results appear, etc. With the help of this tool, you will be able to see how Google sees what is going on on your website.

In turn, it allows those looking to increase their promotional campaigns to effectively reach a wider audience to improve their SEO. Once you have verified your website on Google Search Console, you will need to set up Google Analytics and link them together for more detailed analytics.

12. Consider internal links to your posts

Internal linking is one of the most important things you can do to increase your website's ranking in search engines. You will be able to keep users on your page and create a great experience for them just by linking to other content to ensure they navigate between your pages. Additionally, more internal links help you position your pages at the top of search engine results.

In each of your blog posts, you should make sure to include at least 2 to 3 relevant links to other pages on the same blog or website.

13. Submit and update sitemaps or XML

Talking about an XML sitemap, it is a file that helps display all the pages of a website to make sure that Google can easily find and crawl them. With the help of sitemaps, Google can have a proper understanding of the structure of your website along with specific relevant pages while determining rankings.

Not only that, submitting your sitemap back can greatly help with content discovery and ensuring it is read and crawled. It lets Google and other search engines know if certain pages on your website have been updated, added or deleted.

14. Take advantage of WordPress plugins

The best thing about WordPress is undoubtedly plugins. These are the pieces of code written by other people, you're all set. Depending on your unique requirements, you can focus on only downloading the add-ons that you need or that will make your work easier.

You will find some widgets that help you create internal links automatically once you type keywords similar to previous posts. Likewise, there are also some other plugins that constantly check your website for broken links, just go to the “Plugins” section of your WordPress dashboard to find the right plugin according to your requirements.

15. Optimize the WordPress site structure

The structure of your website is what helps both search engines and users understand and navigate the content. The hierarchy of your pages must be respected according to priority and publication date. All you need is to organize what is displayed correctly, as the bound data helps users navigate your site.

Always make sure that your homepage is clear and easy to navigate. Never clutter your homepage with too many options because it will make your website more difficult for visitors to understand. Also, consider adding sections and subsections to arrange everything by category. You should add a clear menu with navigation categories as it helps users navigate between topics in your website.

16. Permalinks and URLs are very important

When it comes to SEO, URL structure matters a lot. Fortunately, WordPress URLs are well structured. Not only is it logical, but it is also well organized by category and according to best practices.

On the contrary, some free hosting, such as Blogger, merges the mobile publication date with the link, which gives a bad impression and negatively affects its ranking on Google. To reap the benefits of your WordPress URL, you need to stuff your keywords into the post URL.

It's important to avoid adding mutable elements, especially in your URL. Not only that, but you should always ensure that your permalink structure does not include the date or year published. So, even when you update the content it remains outdated in the eyes of Google and this is not at all good for SEO on WordPress.

Google always gives weight to newer content as more accurate, reposting with a new date will not help anything and will result in losing any links to your previous post. One of the best ways is to use a note like “Date Updated” or “Last Modified” in the middle of the article to notify both search engines and users when your content was last updated. This helps show that your content is relevant and constantly updated. You can even do this manually or with the help of plugins.

Summary

By implementing all these tips we mentioned and best practices for WordPress SEO, you will be able to give an extra edge to your website or blog. If you find any difficulties in implementing these tips, choosing to seek help from an expert in providing search engine optimization services will help you greatly.