The Super Affiliate Challenge & How I Increased The Speed Of My Blog!

byAndrew-74

7.3K followers

Updated 6 years ago

Hello everyone! I hope you are all doing very well and have had a productive week. Today I would like to give you a bit of an update of what I've been up to as well as giving you a bit of advice that might just help you get better rankings.

As many of you will be aware the Wealthy Affiliate Super Affiliate Challenge for 2019 has begun. I was fortunate enough to be one of the lucky ones who applied and was accepted for this course.

The Wealthy Affiliate Super Affiliate Training

For those of you that aren't't aware, the Super Affiliate course is basically an intensive course where you get your website in the best shape possible to become an authority within your niche. It's a one-year-long course that involves a lot of hard work and content creation.

It was during this first month of the super Affiliate Training that I started to really look at what was going on in the background of my website.

One of the first things that I wanted to do was to make sure that everything was running smoothly on my site. And this is when I discovered a problem...

Getting My Website In The Best Possible Shape

As I started going through the Super Affiliate training it became clear that I needed to a bit of tidying up on my website. As some of you will already know, I have been running a website that promotes Wealthy Affiliate for a couple of years now. www.makemoneyonline.zone has made me a decent amount of income in the time that I have been running it. But I still haven't reached my goal of earning a full time income from my online business.

So with the goal of eventually earning a full time income, I started work on revamping my site and getting in the best possible shape.

It was whilst I was going through the Super Affiliate training that I discovered my website wasn't running as fast as it could be. In fact, the performance wasn't great at all on mobile devices!

And this is a big problem!

Website Speed Has A Big Impact On Rankings

Over the last few months I have seen a decrease in traffic. Now I have to admit that I have been working on other projects and haven't put as much effort into the Make Money Online Zone website as I should have. So I thought this was probably the reason for my drop in traffic.

However, I also found that my site was not performing as well as it should, thanks to one of the tools found here on WA.

Your website speed has a big impact on your rankings. If you have a website that loads slowly, Google won't rank you as highly as a site that runs much faster. Although there are lots of elements that Google takes into consideration when raking your site, page speed is very important!

You can check how fast your website posts and pages are running by heading over to the "details" section of your Site Manager page.

If you want to see how well your website pages are performing, just head over to the details section and scroll down to the Page Speed Insights section. This tool will give you a rating from 1 to 100 and will check your website pages for both Desktop and Mobile optimization.

The above screenshot was taken after I had optimized my website. But when I first started checking the posts on my site, I discovered that things weren't too good at all. As you can see, my website now scores high 90s for just about all of my pages. But before I started optimizing, the results for mobile devices were in the mid 50s. This was not a good result!

At this point I realized that my slow page speed must have been having a big impact on my Google rankings.

So I decided to pull my website apart to try to find out the cause of the issue...

Speeding Up The Pages On My Website

As I have been running my website for some time I have just concentrated on building content, rather than watching what was going on with such things as page speed. I now realize that this was a mistake on my part.

So in order to try to speed up my posts and pages I started to investigate some of the main issues that can slow down a website.

There are quite a few things that can affect your site. Even the WordPress theme that you choose can eventually slow down your website. But the main two causes of slow pages are large images that take a long time to load on your page and the Plugins that you use within your site.

I knew that the general Theme that I used for my site was good as I use a premium theme that is designed for fast loading. I also knew that my images were being optimized for best results too.

So this left me wondering about the plugins that I had installed on my website...

Too Many Plugins = Slow Loading Times!

My website has evolved quite a lot since I first started and I have tried many great plugins. Some plugins really have helped my site, whilst others haven't. Unfortunately, I diddn't manage my plugins very well and as a result I had ended up with quite a few that I didn't really need.

Wealthy Affiliate recommend you to have less than 5 plugins running on your site. I had more than 15!

So I began the task of going through each plugin and getting rid of the ones that weren't essential to the running of my blog.

I started off my disabling all of my plugins entirely. I then tested my page speed again and the results were amazing! My score for mobile optimization went from mid 50s to high 90s right away. This proved to me that there was indeed a problem within the plugins that I had installed on my site.

I then started to turn on the ones that I needed and tested my Site Speed as I went along...

It All Came Down To Just 2 Plugins!

There were two main plugins that were causing me the most problems. I was using a plugin that showed related posts at the bottom of each page. This was the first big issue!

And I was also using a social media plugin that allowed people to share my posts socially. I know that many of you will have plugins like this installed on your website, so perhaps you might want to check yours.

Eventually I sorted out my issue by going through and deleting non-essential plugins and just keeping the ones that I needed the most. However, I still wasn't able to keep it under 5!

As you can see, my Site Health is looking pretty good now. Plugins are still only 50% but that's better than zero!

I still haven't found a social media plugin that doesn't effect my page speed too much either. That's something that I am working on at the moment. So if any of you have any advice on this it would be much appreciated!

Check Your Page Speed!

Hopefully this post will encourage a few of you to go and check your page speed. You can do so on here at Wealthy Affiliate or you can visit Google's Page Speed Insights checker.

You might also be interested to hear about another issue that I had recently with a plugin that many people were using called the Yuzo Related Post Plugin. If you use this plugin, then you should definitely check out this post.

Look Out For Updates!

Hopefully increasing the speed of all my posts and pages will help to increase my traffic and overall search engine ranking.

I'll keep you updated on my progress with the Wealthy Affiliate Super Affiliate challenge and overall rankings.

Thank you to all who have supported me and offered their advice!

Have a fantastic day and a very productive week ahead.

Best Regards,

Andrew