SEO – Page Optimisation

Google Light House Scoring – SEO, Speed Accessibility and Best Practice

We use Google Light House Tools to monitor the websites that we manage.

The scoring and standards change over time and so do plug-ins and themes. So, designing and forgetting isn’t good enough.

SEO scores are monitored weekly. When monitoring, the speeds need to be checked at various times under different server loads. 

We check and aim to maintain:

  • Performance of 80+ on Desktop, 70+ on mobile
  • Best Practice Score of 75+
  • SEO score of 90+
  • Accessibility score of 75+
pressific SEO Perfomance

Doing it yourself?

 

Here are all the tools you need for testing

Mobile-Friendly Test

Check if your website is mobile-friendly using Google’s mobile-friendly tool.

https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

Rich Results Test

Rich results are designed to highlight key information and help search engines understand a page’s purpose.

Check each of your pages for Rich Results.

https://search.google.com/test/rich-results

Social Media Sharing Previews

See how social media builds previews for your website pages.

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

Check Your Page Speed

This is from Google itself. Make sure to see both the Mobile and Desktop tabs. 

https://pagespeed.web.dev/

Here are all the tools you need for optimising

For Page Speed

CDN

Configure a CDN – We use and recommend Cloudflare. A free version is good enough for most.

Use a Good Hosting Provider

Budget hosting is rarely any good. But you can get a virtual private server for as low as £10/$12 per month from reputable providers. We use Google Cloud.

Caching Plugin

We use Litespeed Enterprise with REDIS. Most shared hosting providers don’t provide Litespeed and when they do, they don’t enable REDIS. The next best option is probably WP Rocket. It’s known to be one of the best caching plugins.

Optimise Images

There are plug-ins that can do this for free. ShortPixel does an amazing job. Next Generation Image Format. Also, you can use the EWWW Image Optimizer

We use Litespeed enterprise with unlimited image compression and serve images in the next-gen (WebP) format.

Compression Gzip or Brotli

Gzip compression compresses web files (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files) to a tinier version, sometimes up to 70%-80% smaller. In most cases Brotli can compress files to a smaller size than gzip can, it is therefore generally a better compression method compared to gzip.

You can test if your website is using gzip or Brotli here:

https://www.giftofspeed.com/gzip-test/. Our servers use Brotli.

Rich Results, Meta, Social Media Sharing Previews

Rank Math is the most powerful way to get the best WordPress SEO tools added to your website. The free version of rankmath.com will be sufficient for most websites. Yoast is also a popular SEO tool. We use Rankmath Business for our clients.

Multiple Schemas, Keyword Monitoring, Reports

Rankmath Pro starts at $59+Tax per year and provides good value for money. We use Rankmath Business for our clients.