Recently I’ve shared why your site needs to be ready for mobile, both for visitors in general as well as potential customers (not to mention how Google is calling foul on sites that don’t offer an optimized mobile experience).
However, while mobile is important, just as important is the user experience when it comes to load time of your site, whether that’s a business site or a blog like this.
While Google hasn’t come out directly and said they will penalize low performance sites when it comes to how fast (or slow) they load for visitors, the clues are definitely there:
- How Website Speed Actually Impacts Search Rankings (Moz)
- 50 Reasons Your Website Deserves to Be Penalized By Google (KISSmetrics)
- How Load Time Affects Google Rankings (QuickSprout)
And as mobile becomes ever more pervasive for browsing habits, slow performing websites on desktop browsers are really going to suffer on mobile – which is why you need to look at optimizing your site for faster loading.
To help you, I’ve put together this short walkthrough on using a combination of CDN and caching solutions that I use on this blog as well as my other domains.
It’s made a huge difference since I made the changes (I share the results of one before and after in the walkthrough) – hopefully it should do the same for your site(s) too.
Note: While the walkthrough is primarily for self-hosted WordPress blogs, the CDN solution supports multiple platforms.