Want to speed up your site? Want to improve your SEO? These WordPress plugins can improve your website download speed, a crucial variable in the SEO equation. Making your website faster and improving your SEO will help you get the high rankings you want. Don’t let the technical jargon scare you. If Russ and I can use these plugins, so can you! This is the 3rd of 4 episodes correlating to our podcast on WordPress Plugins.
This post corresponds to our latest podcast episode of “Russ and Randy” – a podcast on Healthcare and Medical Internet Marketing. We hope you like ” Speeding Up WordPress Website with Plugins.” You can find us on iTunes …and now, ReachMD.com!
We use these plugins to increase your overall download speed of your website. Download speed has long become part of the SEO algorithm as it affects user experience. The plugins we use may be a little difficult to understand conceptually, but you do not need to appreciate the concepts to take advantage of these plugins.
Faster, Faster, Faster
Russ talks about using CDN and cache plugins. Content Delivery Network (CDN) uses a system of servers to provide the fast and efficient download of webpages to users based upon their geographic location.
What does this mean?
Most major hosting companies have multiple servers located in different geographic locations. A copy of your website is on each of these servers. When a user wants to view your site, CDN chooses the server which can best handle your request AND is geographically closest to that user in order to maximize download speed.
A CDN plugin allows your WordPress site to take advantage of this speed enhancer.
Caching plugins avoid excessive load times by using areas in your computer’s memory to store recently used information – making it quickly available the next time that information is required. For instance, a website’s pages, images and files may be stored locally on your computer to improve download speed the next time you visit that webpage.
WP-Smush is a great plugin to automatically reduce the size of your image files to make them download as fast as possible.
Google Analytics and SEO
There is really only one SEO plugin which you should use. This SEO plugin is terrific, we love it…and it’s free. Hint: It’s named towards the end of the episode.
Similarly, MonsterInsights is a plugin which allow you to marry your Google Analytics with your WordPress site. Having an analytics package installed on your website is an SEO must, and Google Analytics has become the standard.
See you next week!
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Russ…and Randy
Healthcare and Medical Internet Marketing
Healthcare’s Rx for Web and Social
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