Your sidebar is an important part of your website. Make sure it is optimized for loading. This is another reason to minimize the number of widgets you use.

Next minimize widgets using external JavaScript. To many JavaScript files can slow load time.

Size your images for the web. Big images slow down loading time.

Make sure your widgets aren’t using conflicting headline tags. H1 and H2 tags should be reserved for your site and post title respectively. Don’t use them in your sidebar widgets.

Another way to use your sidebar to boost your SEO is to link to other pages and posts on your own website. Internal linking is important as it gives more context to the current page. Use your sidebar to link to your most relevant posts?

Does optimizing you widgets sound complicated? If you want a quick way to optimize your site’s performance, Hummingbird is a plug in that can automatically do it all for you. It’s a simple plugin to set up and includes file compression, minification, and browser caching.