New Weekly Income Record + Tips For Better Site Speed

Hello WA family. I'm so sorry to be late in updating you on this very exciting thing that happened the first week of May. It's the fact that I made over $245 in a single week!

That's my new record, up from $175 in a week, back in January. Some slow growth but still, any kind of growth is good to see. :)

However, some not so good things also happened. Following the update from Google, my Google PageSpeed Insights gave me RED for mobile speed, which is NOT good.

I had to figure out how to bring it up to at least the yellow, better yet, into the green for mobile. So I spent one whole week trying to figure out what was wrong.

With the Google update, although my site didn't get hit too hard (my average position moved from 11 to 21), I still want to get back to where I was traffic-wise, and the only way to do that is to improve the Mobile speed.

And I found a few things.

Putting them into practice brought me from the RED zone (in the 30s) to the high yellow zone (high 80s) for mobile. There are still some things to improve but at least it's much better!

I'm going to share with you what I did in order to improve my Site Speed and get better rankings. My average during the last 2 weeks has moved up to 16 :)

I do use Google PageSpeed Insights but I also use GTmetrix to help me figure out EXACTLY what is slowing down my website.

Most of the time, it will be one or several of the following;

1) Images

Your biggest culprit will always be IMAGES. If you simply upload without them without optimizing them, your page/website is going to take longer to load.

If possible, try to resize them before uploading them. If not, then you could resize them using the resizing options within your Wordpress back office.

Using GTmetrix will let you know which image specifically needs to be optimized.

Moreover, try to use an image optimization plugin. I use Smush Pro for this. It does have a free version, but the Pro version also comes with extra features such as;

1) lazy loading

2) converting images to next gen format (WebP)

3) CDN server

4) Stripping image metadata (that most of us bloggers don't need)

5) Super compress

However, the free version helps a lot too in compressing your image files.

2) Plugins

Plugins are the second big reason why your website might be loading slow on mobile. It depends on how well the code is written and executed.

Unfortunately, a lot of plugins only focus on the outcome of the job that needs to be done and developers don't pay very much attention to HOW the code is executed.

Moreover, some plugins just don't work well together.

Again, the best way to know is to use GTmetrix as it will tell you exactly which plugin is taking time to load.

3) Themes

Unfortunately, as many beautiful themes as there are available for Wordpress, a lot of them are not SEO-friendly or responsive for mobile. Again, it has to do with the way the code is written and executed.

Sure, your site might show as mobile-friendly, as in, it has a mobile version of the theme but it might not necessarily be RESPONSIVE.

You need to look for a responsive theme that will help both with site speed as well as SEO. The faster your website is, the less the bounce rate will be, and the higher you'll get ranked.

I got mine from MyThemeShop. They have a list of free as well as premium themes. The free themes should, in themselves, improve your site speed greatly!

4) Page Builder Plugin

I put this one separately from the plugin section because I have some specific information regarding them. I was actually initially using Elementor and I know a lot of us use it.

Unfortunately, I was reading up on it and as much as it is user-friendly, it was NOT created with site speed in mind. Therefore, I had to give it up.

Deactivating Elementor sped up my site greatly!

But what about a replacement?

I found another plugin called Page Builder By Site Origin and this is supposed to reduce the number of requests made to the server, as compared to Elementor. Thus, site speed improves.

It's not the best page builder plugin, but I have learned to do away with it because to me, the speed of my site is more important. If speed is not better, I won't get ranked.

What's the use of my website being beautiful with nobody to see it?

5) DON'T use a cache plugin - It broke my site

Okay, it wasn't as bad as it sounds, but apparently, our EXTREME site speed within WA already uses a caching system so you don't need a cache plugin.

It will only interfere with your website and break it when activated.

You might have heard of this as a solution many people out there are giving out on Google, but don't do it!

6) Use Query Monitor

This is another plugin that I downloaded that helps me figure out WHAT is actually interfering with the laoding of a page.

It tells me the amount of time it takes to load, what scripts are loading slow (so you know if it's an image, a plugin, a theme), but know that there is a bit of a learning curve to using this plugin. Even I don't fully understand how to us it yet.

However, it helped me identify the slower plugins, such as Elementor and Autoptimize that I was using previously.

That's About it!

That's everything that I learned within the one week that I was working on my site speed. Yes there is a ton of work, but it's all worth it in the end, when you see your website improving.

It's a cycle; get better site speed, you'll get ranked better. Get ranked better, you get more visitors. Get more visitors with a reduced bounce rate and your rankings get even better, for more visitors!

I hope that this was helpful!

What about you?

How is your month of May going so far? Any good news? Any good improvements? Anything you've new you've learned about Site speed that can help us all improve our websites?

Thank for reading and I'll see you in the next one!

Reyhana