12 tips to help you get started • Yoast

We’ve said this time and time again: a fast website is necessary for SEO. In a sea of similarly good (or not-so-good) results, Google will favor fast pages that can deliver a good user experience to searchers. If your goal is to attain higher rankings and drive organic traffic from Google, you need to speed up your WordPress website. In this post, we’ll discuss tips to help you improve your website performance to get that spot in the search results!

Fast websites perform better on Google

Fast websites tend to outperform slow ones on Google because of one good reason – good user experience, and this aligns with Google’s mission. Google wants to deliver the best results and the best experience for their users. Hence, they want to show users web pages that will answer their search queries and provide a good experience. That’s also why page experience is now a ranking factor in Google.

This makes perfect sense when you put it in context. We’ve all had moments where we click on a link only to hit the back button because it takes so long for the page to load. And when we leave a page (or bounce off a page) like that, we’re way less likely to visit the website again because we know there are better, faster pages to browse. So website performance not only affects user experience but also greatly shapes how visitors judge the quality of your business.

That’s why speeding up your WordPress website is beneficial in many ways. A fast site makes your users happy, they’ll engage...