One of the biggest mistakes many website owners make is failing to measure the impact that their SEO activities have made. This is akin to following a diet and exercise program, and then not bothering to check your weight.

There are two specific SEO metrics which Google looks at very closely to see if the visitors they send to a website via their search results are having a good experience. These are ‘Page Views‘, and ‘Session Time’.

If you have a business with an online presence, it is not enough to have people visit your website; you want them to engage with the website and the content therein. The more that they read articles, watch videos and click through multiple sections of your website the better.

The level of engagement that a visitor has with your site, is measured by a metric called ‘page views’. A high number of page views tells you that visitors are taking an active interest in your website, whereas a low number suggests they are disinterested in looking through it.

This data is measured by Google, and if they see that visitors are clicking through to lots of pages on a website they will increase the ranking of that site. The reason for this is that they want their search engine results to show sites that encourage activity. One way this is achieved is with great content that users find interesting.

Compare this scenario to a site which has little or poor content and as a result, visitors very rarely click through to other pages. The page views metric will be low, therefore, Google reduces the ranking of that site.

There are a lot of things to think about when you’re building a new WordPress website. You need to get the design right, you need to add the right plugins, and you need to make sure that your content remains up to scratch.

However, you also need to make sure that your website’s technical side doesn’t suffer while you focus on improving your design and functionality. Maintaining low load times is essential when it comes to both the user experience and SEO, and you need to make sure that your WordPress website is as fast as possible.

With this in mind, I’ve put together a list of a few easy ways to improve your WordPress website’s speed. They include:

Optimise Image Size

The first thing you should do is make sure that your images are relatively small. Never try and upload high resolution pictures to your WordPress website, because it’s simply not necessary. They will take extra server space and a long time to load, slowing your site down.

If you do have large images, the best thing to do is to compress them before you upload them. If your website is already up and running with a range of large picture files, then you should consider installing a plugin to minimise them.