If you have a local business selling products or services, you have to think about the local ranking of your website. Local SEO will help you surface for related search queries in your area. As Google shows local results first in many cases, you need to make sure Google understands where your location is. In this article, we’ll go over all the things you can do to improve Google’s understanding of your location, which improves your chances to rank locally.
What are ranking factors?
Ranking factors are elements that Google considers when determining the position of a URL in the search results. There are many ranking factors, most of which are characteristics of the URL and your website, but they can further extend to your online presence. An example of a ranking factor is page speed: a fast-loading page that delivers a good user experience is likely to rank higher than a slow page when other characteristics are comparable.
Local SEO ranking factors
In this post, we’ll focus on the factors that influence the ranking of your website’s pages in local searches. As you can read here, Google itself talks about local ranking factors in terms of:
Relevance: are you the relevant result for the user? Does your website match what the user is looking for?
Distance: how far away are you located? If you are relevant and near, chances are you’ll get a good ranking.
Prominence: this is about how well your business is known. More on that at the end of this article.
So you have to show you’re relevant, you’re close by, and you’re well-known. Let’s see how you can work on these factors with some concrete actions!
Be relevant
Being relevant means that you offer the service or products the searcher is looking for. While this might seem pretty straightforward, sometimes, people can get too cryptic on their website. Make sure that you clearly mention what your business or profession is, what kind of products and services you offer, and make sure to do this in the wording your audiences use. To find out if you indeed communicate using the language your audiences use, please conduct some keyword research and speak with your customers to find out which terms they use when looking for a service like yours.
Check out this local content strategy guide for more inspiration to write relevant content for your local business site.
Google Business Profile
For your local ranking in Google, you can’t do without a proper Google Business Profile listing. Google Business Profile is especially helpful if you want to show up properly in the local pack – i.e., the big panel with the map. You need to sign up, pick the right primary categories for your business, add all your locations, verify these and share some photos. You’ll also need to actively manage your profile and build it up over time.
Google Business Profile allows for customer reviews, and you should aim to get some of those for your listing. Every year, the importance of online reviews for local SEO grows. Positive reviews (and negative ones) help Google and its users judge your business. This is pretty much like your local market. If people talk positively about your groceries, more people will be inclined to come to your grocery stand.
Getting reviews is one, but you can keep the conversation going by responding to these reviews. But, as Google puts it, be a friend, not a salesperson.
It helps to sign up for Google My Business if you want to rank your business in the local three-pack
LocalBusiness schema structured data
If you have a local business and serve primarily local customers, of course, you’ll add your address to your website. To help Google and other search engines understand the primary address, you can best serve it in a specific format readable for machines. Use localBusiness schema for that. Our Local SEO plugin makes adding that LocalBusiness schema to your pages a breeze!
This is very much about what Google calls distance. If you are the closest result for the user, your business will surface sooner.
Make sure you have one main NAP!
Even if your business has multiple locations, make sure to match the main NAP (name, address, phone number) on your website with the Google Business Profile NAP. That is the only way to make sure Google makes the proper connection between the two. Add the primary address on every page (you are a local business, so your should mention your address on every page). For all the other locations, set up a page and list all the addresses of your branches.
Facebook listing and reviews
What goes for Google Business Profile goes for Facebook as well. Add your company as a page for a local business to Facebook here. People search a lot on Facebook as well, so you’d better make sure your listing on Facebook is in order. Facebook also allows for reviews, which could help your business too. Keep an eye on those reviews! If your reviews aren’t that great, make sure to fix that by providing better products or services, or at least show in your replies you take the feedback you get seriously.
Location and keywords in title
The obvious one: for ranking locally, adding city and (in the US) state to your <title> helps. Add your main keywords as well and make the title attractive. Please keep in mind that the effect of adding the name of your town to your titles might be a lot less effective for local ranking than adding your business details to your Google Business Profile. But it won’t hurt for sure. For more local content tips, do check out this guide.
In this example, this title could have used a location to help in the local search results
Local directories help your local ranking
In addition to your Google Business Profile listing, Google uses the local Yelp and other local directories to determine just how important and local you are. While we usually recommend against putting your link on a page with a gazillion unrelated links, the common ground for a local listings page is, indeed, the location. And, these links do help your local rankings.
So get your web team to work, find the most important local directory pages and get your details up there. We’re explicitly writing details and not just links. Citations work in confirming the address to both Google and visitors. If a local, relevant website lists addresses, do consider getting yours up there as well. And while you are at it, get some positive reviews on sites like Yelp as well!
Get relelated, high-quality links
Following how directories help your local ranking – especially in the organic local search results, exchanging links with related local businesses also pays off. If you work together in the same supply chain or sell related products, feel free to exchange links. Don’t just exchange links with any business you know. In most cases, these will be low-quality links for your website (because they’re usually unrelated). Also, try to build high-quality content that attracts relevant links. And, don’t forget to get those local keywords in the anchor text of those inbound links.
Social mentions from local folks
Again, there’s a local marketplace online as well. People talk about business, new developments, or new products on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and more. All these social mentions find their way to Google’s sensors as well. The search engine will pick up on positive or negative vibes and use these to help them rank your local business. If many people talk about your business and link to your website, you must be relevant. Monitor these mentions and engage.
Some say links from other websites, directories, and social media are critical for local rankings. As always, we believe it’s the sum of all efforts that makes you stand out from the crowd, not just optimizing one aspect. Take your time and make sure your Google Business Profile is correct, local business structured data is active on your site, and you have proper links to your site and the right people talking about you on other platforms like Twitter. And please don’t forget to do proper keyword research and make sure the right content is on your website.
Optimize your content for better local rankings
Google won’t rank your site for a keyword if that keyword isn’t on your website. It’s as simple as that. If your business is in city X, you probably have a reason why you are located there. Write about that reason. And note that these may vary:
You are born there or just love the locals and local habits
There is a river which is needed for transport
Your local network makes sure you can deliver just-in-time or provide extra services
The city has a regional function and your business thrives by that
There are six other businesses like yours, you’re obviously the best, and you all serve a certain percentage of people, so your business fits perfectly in that area.
These are just random reasons to help you write about your business in relation to your location. They differ (a lot) per company. Make sure your location/city/area is clearly mentioned on your website and not just in your footer at your address details! If you have multiple locations, set up and write pages for each one and include the proper business details.
Prominence means that when Google can serve a result first from a well-known brand or business, they actually will. Despite all your efforts to improve your local ranking, this might get in the way of that number one position. But, it just means you have to step up your game, keep on doing the great work you do, work on your branding, and trust that eventually, Google will notice this as well. As a result, Google might allow you to rank on that number one position for that local keyword!
Another thing to note is that prominence is also based on the information that Google knows about a business. All this information is derived from links, articles, and directories across the web. The more positive reviews and ratings your business has, the more likely Google will place it in a high position for local search queries. Not to mention, your position on the “normal” search results page (web results) is also a ranking signal. So, invest some time and resources into SEO if possible, and ask your satisfied customers to leave a good review on Google and other platforms such as Yelp or Facebook.
Today, we’re releasing updates for four plugins and add-ons: Yoast SEO 19.10, Yoast SEO Premium 19.5, Local SEO 14.7, and WooCommerce SEO 15.3. The updates mainly consist of enhancements and fixes, plus support for material structured data in WooCommerce SEO. Find out what else is new!
Yoast SEO 19.10 and Premium 19.5
The overarching theme of these releases is to get ready for the upcoming High Performance Order Storage feature in WooCommerce 7.1+. This feature is more commonly known as custom order tables. This long-awaited improvement promises significant performance gains for ecommerce sites. With today’s update, all of our WordPress plugins support this.
Besides that, we improved some small things in Yoast SEO, like giving you better feedback in the Flesch Reading Ease insights when we see that text is fairly difficult. Plus, we’ve fixed two bugs related to our integration with Elementor.
WooCommerce SEO: material structured data
When working on your ecommerce store, you need help from the WooCommerce SEO add-on for Yoast SEO. This helps you finetune your online store and improves the product structured data that Google needs to present your products in the search results.
Besides updating it for the above-mentioned new feature in WooCommerce, we’ve added two enhancements that make WooCommerce SEO even better. Recently, Google added support for material in the product structured data, which lets you specify what material your product is made of. This gives Google more details about your product; we all know the more information you provide, the better.
Go to the dashboard and click on Yoast SEO > WooCommerce SEO
Set the Material option to Product Material
Go to Products > Attributes
Add a new attribute and name it Material
Add a product material, like Wood
Go to Products -> Add new
Set a name and a price for the product, choose Material from the custom attributes, and select Wood
Go to the product page, inspect the source code and scroll down to the Product schema structured data
Tadaa! You’ll notice the material property in the Product schema. This should be set to the product material wood
Here’s what that looks like in the Schema Validator:
The material is now available in your product structured data thanks to WooCommerce SEO
Local SEO for Yoast SEO
Local SEO is the add-on you need if you focus on getting your business noticed locally. The Local SEO plugin helps you get all your business details in order — like opening hours and maps — and translates those details into structured data that Google can use to highlight in the search results. In this release, we’ve fixed several minor issues to keep Local SEO in top shape.
Update now to Yoast SEO 19.10 and the others
Today, we’re releasing updates to most of our plugins. These updates come with loads of fixes and enhancements to help you make the most of your work! Update now to get the latest and greatest.
WordPress 6.1 – the last major release of 2022 – is finally here! This release is a step in the right direction for full-site editing, bringing various customization options and improvements to the content creation and site creation experience. We’ve covered some notable changes in this update, which you can check out here. This post is dedicated to exploring the performance enhancements coming to our favorite open-source platform.
WordPress 6.1 is the collective effort of a massive team of developers and contributors. Jean Baptiste Audras – the Triage team lead – shared some amazing statistics about the contributions to this release. An impressive 800people from at least 60 countries and 180 identified companies contributed to WordPress 6.1.
At Yoast, we’re proud of the work we’ve put into making this release possible. Out of all companies that contributed to 6.1, Yoast takes the number 2 spot with 740 contributions made by 16 contributors. Sergey Biryukov – a member of our dedicated team of WordPress contributors – tops the list with a whopping 584 contributions! Not to mention Bluehost – a fellow company in Newfold Digital – also contributed greatly to this release with 150 contributions.
The WordPress Core Performance Team has done some incredible work to make the platform faster in the 6.1 release. This team, comprising members from Google, 10up, XWP, and Yoast, was formed in 2021 to monitor, enhance, and promote performance in WordPress core and its surrounding ecosystem. Without them, these improvements wouldn’t have been possible.
Performance improvements are always welcomed by the community. We all know the importance of good website performance for SEO – a fast site is more favorable to rank high in the SERP. That’s due to Google and other search engines rewarding sites that deliver a fast and smooth user experience. Of course, you need good content to rank. But among many quality results, any small performance improvements may prove to be significant.
Let’s dive into some of the notable performance enhancements in WordPress 6.1!
Huge improvements to WP_Query with caching additions
The addition of caching to WP_Query is one of the most significant performance improvements in WordPress 6.1. Basically, every time a visitor requests a web page, their browser has to make a request to the web server asking for information. The server needs to respond to this request and retrieve data from a database (or multiple ones) to send back. By implementing caching to WP_Query, the next time another visitor requests that same page, the page’s data would be retrieved from the website’s cache instead of retrieving data directly from the database.
These changes aim to reduce the number of database queries and make sites faster, especially when using persistent object caching like Redis or Memcached. That’s because the database query will not run again until caches are invalidated. With fewer database queries, your pages will load faster, thus providing a better user experience for visitors.
This is a much anticipated and welcomed improvement for many, especially developers. Jonny Harris – the contributor who worked on this improvement – shared his excitement in a recent Tweet.
In WordPress 6.1, there is a massive improvement to database performance. Database queries in WP_Query are now cached. A ticket I have been working on for 5+ years was merged. This should result in billions of less repeated database queries https://t.co/ippLh2CM5o
Another significant performance boost comes with improvements to the REST API. In short, these updates decrease the number of database queries that run on each REST API request, allowing your pages to load faster.
For instance, WordPress introduces an improvement of the post controller in the REST API. When returning a post in a REST API response, the post controller would request linked data such as author, featured image, and text. Since these linked items are not primed (ready for use) in caches, it might mean that for each post in the REST API response, there would be data queries from separate databases: one for the author, one for the featured image, and another for the text.
Instead, in WordPress 6.1, all the caches are primed in a single database query. That means that the post controller in the REST API can grab data from that single database query instead of requesting data from separate databases, resulting in fewer queries.
Improvements to the Cache API
The Cache API gets various improvements in this release. Most notably, several private cache priming functions are available for public use in this release. WordPress encourages plugin and theme authors to use these functions to improve the performance of their code by reducing the number of database queries, which improves the website’s load speed.
Media improvements
WordPress 6.1 will automatically add decoding="async" to image attributes. In simple terms, this function tells your visitor’s browser that it’s okay to load images a bit later in favor of other information and data. This results in the page loading the content much faster and also reduces page render time. This is a huge performance booster for any web page containing a lot of images. It’s also good to know that you can remove this function.
Site health improvements
WordPress 6.1 introduces two new Site Health checks for Persistent Object Cache and Page Cache.
Persistent Object Cache – This new check determines whether the site uses a persistent object cache or not and recommends it if it makes sense for the site. It also links to a support resource created for the check. A few filters have been included for hosting providers to provide more specific steps regarding their environment.
Full Page Cache – This new check determines whether the site is using a full page cache solution and if the response time is acceptable. It also adds a couple of filters for hosting companies to customize the response threshold and add their own cache headers to be detected.
Improved compatibility with PHP 8x
WordPress 6.1 receives important compatibility improvements with PHP 8.0 and 8.1. All of this is possible thanks to the incredible work of many developers, especially Juliette Reinders Folmer. A few of us Yoasters also contributed to this effort, namely Sergey Biryukov, Carolina, and Ari Stathopoulos!
The 6.1 release has continued the code modernization efforts on updating WordPress core and unit test suite for PHP 8.0 and 8.1, as well as preparing for PHP 8.2. Version 8.2 of PHP is expected to be released on November 24, 2022. We can expect some significant changes coming in PHP 8.2, which could impact many themes and plugins.
The big step forward in this release is that WordPress core unit tests now pass on PHP 8.1 and 8.2. While full compatibility with PHP 8.1 and 8.2 is still a work in progress, this should prevent new PHP issues from being introduced in WordPress core. All remaining known issues are deprecation notices.
It’s good to note that a deprecation notice is not an error, but rather an indicator of where additional work is needed for compatibility before PHP 9 (i.e. when the notices become fatal errors). With a deprecation notice, the PHP code will continue to work and nothing is broken.
Changes to the loading routine
As of WordPress 6.1, the send_headers hook has been moved to slightly later in the WordPress loading routine. This is a ticket that our Sergey Biryukov worked on!
When you request a page, the web server needs to send back some headers that contain technical information about the page like response status. This lacks flexibility because some functions wouldn’t work when headers are being sent. By moving send_headers to after WordPress parses the query, those functions now work properly. This change may affect plugin developers, making it easier for them to manage header.
Performance enhancements in the editor
Some optimizations were made to the block editor to avoid repetitive calls to filesystem and processing of block.json files. These changes should improve loading performance and benefit all WordPress sites. Ari Stathopoulos – another member of our WordPress core contributor team – was responsible for making this happen!
Want to try out more performance improvements?
The WordPress Core Performance team has created the Performance Lab plugin to give users early access to new performance modules they’re working on. Install it and you’ll be able to try out their latest developments yourself, see how they impact your site’s performance and share any feedback you have. If you’d like to be even more involved, you can also help out as a contributor! And if you’re interested in finding out more about the performance improvements in 6.1, don’t forget to check out this Performance Field Guide thread. It contains loads of useful information for developers!
In this day and age, page speed is everything. Not a day goes by without a new article, Google representative, or SEO expert telling us that optimizing for speed is among the most important things you should do for your website. And they’re right, of course! Page speed influences SEO in many ways. Here’s an overview of how page speed and SEO go together.
“Page speed†refers to how fast the content on your page loads. It sounds simple; the faster your content loads, the quicker your page speed is. However, it’s good to understand that page speed is somewhat of an umbrella concept because there’s not a single metric that can define how fast your web page loads.
When discussing page speed in website performance, we should not consider it similar to how fast a car can go. A car can go 100km/h, and you can say that’s the car’s speed. But when talking about page speed, there is much more going on than just “this page loads in 4 secondsâ€. It’s much better to think of page speed as part of the user experience that your visitors will get when interacting with your website.
How to think about page speed
In an ideal world, you’d click a link in the search results, and the corresponding page would appear instantly. But we all know that’s a pipe dream. Over the years, pages have only increased in size, and the popularity of JavaScript made them even more complex and harder to load. Loading a web page can still be a drag, even with lightning-fast internet connections and potent devices.
Think about when you visit a web page. Do you wait for the page to load fully before interacting with it? Or do you start scrolling around and checking things right when you see content starts appearing? And if you start interacting with the page right away when there’s content, do you find missing elements (text, images, videos, buttons) when you scroll deeper on the page?
Here’s another question for you. Let’s say we have two pages. The first page quickly displays the first bits of content on your screen, but it takes longer before you can interact with things. The second page shows content a tad bit slower, but elements on the page, such as images and buttons, work properly. Between the two, which one would you say has better “page speed�
As you can see, “page speed†is not necessarily about how fast a web page can load but more about how quickly it can provide a good user experience. Even if the page’s main content is quick to load, but other elements take longer to appear, you’ll still feel like the page is slow because you have to wait before you can interact with it.
There’s no single metric to define page speed
By now, you may understand that it’s tricky to define the “speed†of a web page or how “fast†a page is. Page speed is a multifaceted concept that can’t be determined using a single metric. Not to mention, many things affect the loading speed of a website, which we will get to later in this article.
When you click on a link to visit a web page, your browser has to make a request to the server of the website asking for content and other information. That content has to be loaded fully or partially on the browser before the user can interact with the page. At the same time, many things happen when a page gets loaded. You see things start appearing and popping up on your screen. After a brief moment, you can begin to interact with the page.
But when you take a step back and think about how we browse the web, we tend to interact with a page almost simultaneously when content appears on our screen. We tend not to wait for the page to load before we start exploring fully. At the same time, we don’t like it when we start scrolling, but things only pop up a bit later.
So to gauge the “speed†of a web page, we need to use several metrics in combination with each other to determine how fast and smooth the user experience on that page is. For that reason, Google introduced Web Vitals in 2020 – a set of metrics to measure websites’ speed and user experience. These metrics made their way into the Google core algorithm update in 2021, becoming the Core Web Vitals we know today.
Core Web Vitals give insights into your page speed
Core Web Vitals look at three aspects of a web page: loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. From those three aspects, Google defined the following metrics:
Loading – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric measures how long it takes for the most significant piece of content to appear on the screen.
Interactivity – First Input Delay (FID): This metric measures how fast the page can respond to the first user interaction.
Visual Stability – Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric measures the stability of visual elements on your page. In other words, does stuff move around on the screen while loading?
Metrics in Core Web Vitals
Google also set the standard measurements for each of these metrics and split them into three categories: good, need improvement, and poor. For instance, a page with a First Input Delay (FID) of below 300ms is considered poor, while above 100ms is considered good.
It’s worth noting that you have to meet or surpass the target performance in the “good” categories for 75% of your real-world visitors, in a 28-day period to pass Core Web Vitals. Generally speaking, that means three out of four visitors must experience the target level of performance or better.
If you’re looking to improve your page speed, it’s essential to know and understand these metrics. And with page speed improvement, you may also enhance your ranking on Google.
Differences between page speed and site speed
Some people use the term “page speed,†while others use “site speed†when discussing website performance. They are similar but surely not the same. Page speed only refers to the performance of a single web page, while site speed refers to the overall performance of a whole website.
It’s easier to measure the performance of a single web page as we have metrics in Core Web Vitals to work with. On the other hand, measuring the performance of a whole website is very tricky as a site can contain hundreds, even up to millions of pages. In addition, each of those pages behaves differently as they have different content and purposes.Â
Similar to “page speed,†you can’t define the speed of a website with a single metric. However, a website is just a combination of a bunch of web pages put together in a structured way. So let’s say most of your pages pass Core Web Vitals, then you can consider your site “fast.†If the opposite is true, you have slow “site speed.â€
How important is page speed for SEO?
It’s a no-brainer that you want your website to be fast. A fast site means your pages load quickly. Of course, people come to your website for your content and your offers. However, that awesome and unique content must be accompanied by a good user experience.
Fast-loading sites have higher conversion rates and lower bounce rates
Attention spans are notoriously short. As the internet gets faster, they’re getting shorter still. Numerous studies have found a clear link between the amount of time a page takes to load and the percentage of visitors who will get bored of waiting. For instance, Google found out in their research that:
The probability of a visitor leaving a page without interacting increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds (thinkwithgoogle)
The probability of a visitor leaving a page without interacting increases to 90% as page load time goes from 1 second to 5 (thinkwithgoogle)
Your goal should be to be the fastest site in your niche. Be faster than your competitors. Having a site or an e-commerce platform that takes forever to load won’t do you any good. People hit that back button in a split second, never to return. With each bounced visitor, you are losing money and brand loyalty. Speed and efficiency are everything these days, so people won’t sit around waiting for your page when there are other alternatives.
By offering a fast site, you encourage your visitors to stay longer. Not to mention, you’re helping them get through their checkout journey faster. That helps improve your conversion rate and build trust and brand loyalty. Think of all the times you’ve been cursing the screen because you had to wait for a page to load or be running in circles because the user experience was atrocious. It happens so often — don’t be that site.
A fast page improves user experience
Google understands that the time it takes for a page to load is vital to the overall user experience. Waiting for content to appear, the inability to interact with a page, and even noticing delays create friction.
That friction costs time, money, and your visitor’s experience. Research shows that the level of stress from waiting for slow mobile results can be more stressful than watching a horror movie. Surely not, you say? That’s what the fine folks at Ericsson Research found a few years back.
Improving your site speed across the board means making people happy. They’ll enjoy using your site, buy more and come back more often. This means that Google will see your site as a great search result because you are delivering the goods regarding site quality. Eventually, you might get a nice ranking boost.
Frustration hurts your users and hurts your rankings
It’s not just Google – research from every corner of the web on all aspects of consumer behavior shows that speed significantly impacts outcomes.
Nearly 70% of consumers say that page speed impacts their willingness to buy (unbounce)
Nearly 50% of consumers admit they are willing to give up animation and video for faster load times (unbounce)
20% of users abandon their cart if the transaction process is too slow (radware.com)
The BBC found they lost an additional 10% of users for every additional second their site took to load
These costs and site abandonment happen because users dislike being frustrated. Poor experiences mean they go elsewhere, visit other websites, and convert to competitors. Google easily tracks those behaviors (through bounces back to search engine results pages, short visits, and other signals) and is a strong signal that the page shouldn’t be ranking where it was.
Google needs fast sites
Speed isn’t only good for users – it’s good for Google, too. Slow websites are often slow because they’re inefficient. They may load too many large files, haven’t optimized their media, or don’t make use of modern technologies to serve their page. That means that Google has to consume more bandwidth, allocate more resources, and spend more money.
Across the whole web, every millisecond they can save, and every byte they don’t have to process, adds up quickly. And quite often, simple changes to configuration, processes, or code can make websites much faster with no drawbacks. That may be why Google is so vocal about its education on performance.
A faster web is better for users and significantly reduces Google’s operating costs. Either way that means that they’re going to continue rewarding fast(er) sites.
Improve page speed helps to improve crawling for search engines
Modern sites are incredibly wieldy, and untangling that mess can make a big difference. The bigger your site is, the more impact page speed optimizations will have. That not only impacts user experience and conversion rates but also affects crawl budget and crawl rate.Â
When a Googlebot comes around and crawls your webpage, it crawls the HTML file. Any resources referenced in the file, like images, CSS, and JavaScript, will be fetched separately. The more files you have and the heavier they are, the longer it will take for the Googlebot to go through them.
On the flip side, the more time Google spends on crawling a page and its files, the less time and resources Google has to dedicate to other pages. And that means that Google may miss out on other important pages and content on your site.
Optimizing your website and content for speed will provide a good user experience for your visitors and help Googlebots better crawl your site. They can come around more often and get more done.
Page speed is a ranking factor
Google has repeatedly said that a fast site helps you rank better. So it’s no surprise that Google has been measuring the speed of your site and using that in their ranking algorithms since 2010.
In 2018, Google launched the so-called ‘Speed Update,’ making page speed a ranking factor for mobile searches. Google stressed it would only affect the slowest sites and that fast sites getting faster won’t get a boost, but they are looking at website performance across the board.
In 2021, Google announced the page experience algorithm update, demonstrating that page speed and user experience are intertwined. Core Web Vitals clearly state that speed is an essential ranking factor. The update also gave site owners metrics and standards to work with.
Of course, Google still wants to serve searchers the most relevant information even if the page experience is somewhat lacking. Creating high-quality content is still the best way to rank. However, Google also states that page experience signals become more important when many pages with relevant content compete for visibility in the search result.
The Speed Update, which enables page speed in mobile search ranking, is now rolling out for all users!
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) July 9, 2018
Google mobile-first index
Another significance of page speed for ranking is Google’s mobile-first approach to indexing content. That means Google uses the mobile version of your pages for indexing and ranking. This approach makes sense as we increasingly rely on mobile devices to go online. In recent research, Semrush found out that 66% of all website visits come from mobile devices
To compete for a spot in the search results, your mobile page needs to meet Core Web Vitals standards and other page experience signals. And this is not easy at all. Pages on mobile take longer to load compared to their desktop counterparts, while attention span stays the same. People might be more patient on mobile devices, but not a lot more. Take a look at some statistics:
The average website loading time is 2.5 seconds on desktop and 8.6 seconds on mobile, based on an analysis of the top 100 web pages worldwide (tooltester)
The average mobile web page takes 15.3 seconds to load (thinkwithgoogle)
On average, webpages on mobile take 70.9% longer to load than on desktop (tooltester)
A loading speed of 10 seconds increases the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing by 123% compared to a one-second loading speed (thinkwithgoogle)
All the more reasons to optimize your website and content if your goal is to win a spot in the SERP.
Factors that affect your page speed
Many factors affect a page’s loading speed, but we think you might know this already. Though there’s one thing you can’t control: the connection quality of your end user. Other than that, factors that influence your page speed include:
Your hosting service
Hosting services play a crucial role in the performance of your website because they provide the server where your site lives. So their server performance directly affects how your website performs. Factors influencing your host’s performance range from their server configurations, facilities, uptime, and specifications of machines running the servers. By choosing a good and reliable hosting, you ensure that your web server can process requests fast enough to accommodate all activities on your site. In addition, you’re eliminating one factor from the speed optimization equation.
Your website theme
Themes control the design of your website, from layouts and font to color scheme. But not all themes are created equally. Some themes are much cleaner and more optimized than others. They have a smaller file size, making them easier to load. That also means they have fewer bells and whistles (think of animation or specialized design patterns) compared to others that are a bit extra. But that’s a good trade-off if you want better loading performance.
Large file size
We’re talking about many types of files here, from your HTML file to CSS, and primarily JavaScript. Any bytes and kilobytes you can shave off these files will impact your page’s performance. In addition, modern sites use a lot of JavaScript to make the site dynamic. It’s what makes those flashy, cool animations and transitions you see on websites nowadays possible.
But JavaScript is also heavy, and overusing it makes a page clunky and difficult to load. You may have a low FID score in Core Web Vitals because processing these JavaScript files takes longer, especially on mobile devices, since their processing power isn’t as great as desktop computers.
Badly written code
Bad code can lead to many issues, from JavaScript errors to invalid HTML markups. Poorly-optimized code can cause significant dips in performance. Clean up your code, remove any errors, and eliminate any extra lines that do not add meaningful value.
Images and videos
Heavy images are the culprit of a slow-loading page. They take up a considerable chunk of your page’s weight (in kilobytes or megabytes). If your page has a large and unoptimized header image, you might have a low LCP score in Core Web Vitals. That’s because LCP measures how long it takes for the largest piece of content to appear on the screen, and your large image will surely take time to load. Image SEO plays a huge role in upping your site speed.
Too many plugins and widgets
If you’re running your site on WordPress, you’re undoubtedly using plugins and widgets to add functionalities to your site. Plugins are what makes WordPress such a powerful platform. But using too many plugins is counterintuitive because they slow your website down. Every plugin you install adds a bit of code to your page, making it heavier than it should be. Unoptimized plugins can also play a significant role in slowing down a website.
Absence of a CDN
CDN stands for content delivery network. It is an interconnected network of servers and their data centers distributed in various geographical locations. They can help with page loading performance, especially if you have an international audience.
A CDN saves your website’s static content, like CSS and image files, across various servers in the network. It does this so it can quickly serve these files to people who live close to one of the servers in the network. Let’s say your server is based in Australia, but you have many visitors from India. Instead of sending files directly from Australia, the CDN can send files from a server in India, making this process faster and more efficient.
Redirects
Redirects are a natural part of any website, and there’s nothing wrong with them. But keep in mind that redirects may impact your page’s loading performance if not configured properly. In most cases, they won’t significantly slow you down. But in the case of redirect chains, they will. By linking as close to the final destination as possible, you avoid creating too many redirects and thus, reduce your website’s load.
How to check if your page loads slowly
Unsurprisingly, some of the best resources for optimizing your website are from Google. We recommend that you explore their Web Fundamentals documentation to understand the techniques, tools, and approaches to building faster websites. Various tools are also available for measuring and monitoring the speed of your site. Here are a few that we recommend trying out:
Google PageSpeed Insights – A very powerful option that provides ‘real user metrics’ of your website, straight from Google. It’s also one of the most important tools you should know how to use.
The Page Experience report in Google Search Console – Don’t forget to check out this tool. It summarizes the user experience of visitors to your site, showing how many URLs pass or fail Core Web Vitals and other page experience signals.
Lighthouse, for Google Chrome – This is one of the most sophisticated performance measurement tools available and great for benchmarking.
WebPageTest – This tool provides a waterfall diagram of how all the assets load on your website. Great for spotting slow resources and bottlenecks.
Chrome Developer Console – This tool shows you exactly what’s happening as your site loads, on your computer and in your browser.
Optimize your site is more than looking at numbers
As you know by now, page speed is not only crucial for SEO but also for your sales, retention, and brand loyalty. Create great content, optimize your website and pages to meet Core Web Vitals’ standards, and aim for that top spot on the first page of Google.
It’s good to note that optimizing your site for page speed is not as simple as getting a good score in all those speed test tools. Don’t blind yourself to scores and metrics as those numbers are not representative of all your visitors. Every user is different. Every visitor uses another type of internet connection, device, and browser. Find out who your users are, how they access your site, and what they do while they’re there.
Combine tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, WebPageTest.org, and Lighthouse with analytical tools to get a broad overview of speed issues on your site. Use the recommendations to get started on improving your page speed, but do take these with a grain of salt. They are great starting points, but there is so much more you can do!
Page speed optimization resources for you
To get started with optimizing your page’s performance, check out these articles and documentation:
Have you heard the news? WordPress 6.1 is out! Welcome to the third and last major WordPress release of 2022. This release continues to build, iterate and refine the full-site editing experience introduced in WordPress 5.9 earlier this year. It brings us new possibilities to easily change up the styling of our website, spice up our page design, and other improvements to our favorite open-source platform. Let’s take a closer look at what 6.1 brings to the table!
This release is a step in the right direction for full-site editing. Full-site editing and block themes arrived to WordPress with the promise to put more control in the hand of users, allowing them to do more with creating and designing a website. Version 6.1 is on track to deliver this promise. We’re seeing a release that focuses quite heavily on providing customization options and enhancing the site-editing experience.
WordPress 6.1 introduces more than 2,000 updates since the release of WordPress 6.0 in May 2022. All the gains, enhancements, and improvements from version 13.1 to 14.1 of the Gutenberg plugin were committed to core. Since we can’t possibly cover all the updates in a single article, we’ll focus on several notable changes instead.
More control over your global style preset
The global style interface was first introduced in WordPress 5.9 and received a lot of attention and praise. It allows you to easily switch up the look and feel of your website. In just a few clicks, you can change the color palette of your entire site or change the default font, size, and color of your text and links. WordPress 6.1 brings even more customization to the global style interface. You can now determine presets for:
The default appearance of typography for headings and buttons
The default colors of headings and buttons
The width of the main content area and block spacing in the global layout
All of this is great for design consistency. And that’s not all. You can even configure the default appearance for specific blocks, which allows for even more creativity in designing websites. Let’s say you want texts in the ‘list’ block to always be in the color green, you can easily do that now.
It’s good to note that the global style feature is only available on block themes, so you won’t see this option if you’re running a theme that doesn’t support full-site editing.
WordPress is determined to provide more design controls to users, which is reflected in the new Twenty Twenty-Three (TT3) default block theme. The new theme is designed to leverage all the new design tools introduced in 6.1. When you first install this theme, it may look a bit underwhelming with the default style, but there’s a lot more than meets the eye.
Going into customizing TT3, you’ll find that it actually comes with 10 style variations for you to play around with. These variations were selected from a wide range of entries from the community. What’s impressive is that each of these variations is totally distinct from one another. Each variation has its own color palette, typography, layout,…. and they all look amazing.
Previously, the default WordPress themes were a bit underwhelming when talking about their appearances. Many people would choose a third-party theme because they look better and offer more customization possibilities. TT3 may change that. The new 10 style variations may just satisfy the needs of many, especially bloggers and small website owners. Not to mention, this theme may set an example for other themes, paving the way for more style variations in non-default themes and making it a standard to have multiple variations.
The design tools in the post editor are getting lots of improvements and enhancements, allowing you to get finer control of your page’s design and layout. WordPress 6.1 also brings consistency to the availability of design tools for different blocks. And it’s good to know that you can also override any global settings with adjustments made in the design tools in the post editor.
Dimension control in more blocks
WordPress 6.1 brings dimension control to blocks like paragraph, list, table, and more. In the sidebar of the post editor, you’ll find a section called “dimensions†where you can leverage this new enhancement. Don’t forget to check the 3-dot menu to see if any settings are hidden. For instance, you can now control the padding of the paragraph and group block. For the column and gallery block, it’s possible to control the spacing between elements in these blocks.
Border control improvements
This release also adds border support for more blocks and allows users to adjust the top, bottom, left, and right border separately. For instance, when using the gallery block, you can determine the border and its radius for each image in the gallery. And you can add actual borders to images, which was unavailable previously.
Featured image in cover block
You can now easily add your featured image to the cover block, allowing you to conveniently use the featured image anywhere on a page. When you add a cover block, there will be an option in the toolbar that lets you grab the featured image.
Visualizer for padding and spacing
There’s a real-time visualizer to help users with adjusting dimensions. It conveniently shows you how changes affect your page layout as you’re making the change. Pretty handy for retaining layout and design consistency.
Fluid typography
Another design improvement coming in this release is fluid typography. This feature allows theme makers to configure text to automatically scale depending on the screen where it’s viewed. Of course, websites nowadays are responsive so text does scale and resize according to screen sizes. But the problem is that it only scales to specific screen sizes, so text on anything outside of those pre-determined sizes won’t scale properly.
On the other hand, fluid typography lets you resize text smoothly to match any device’s width. However, this feature is opt-in, so it only works if theme makers decide to implement the feature. It also works on blocks that support typography control, of which list you can find here.
New templates in the site editor
With full-site editing, you get a new editing experience with the “site editor†instead of working with the theme customizer tool. In the site editor, you can create templates for various pages, including your homepage, single post, 404 page, and search result page. The template creation experience has been expanded in WordPress 6.1, allowing you to create custom templates to use on any type of post or page. In addition to that, you get finer control over some of the templates that you can create, including:
Post: You can choose to create a single template for all posts or for a specific one.
Page: You can now create a template for pages and determine which page will use this template.
Author: You can create a template to use for all authors or for a specific one.
Category: Similar to the post template, you can create a template for all categories or for a single category.
The template creation experience in the site editor has been expanded
Inner block editing capability
Inner block editing is a new feature coming to the quote and list block. As the name suggests, it’s now much easier to separately edit elements within the quote and list block. This is a quality-of-life improvement, especially for those who often work with the list block.
For instance, let’s say you want to move an entry up or down in your list. All you need to do is click on that entry, which prompts the toolbar to appear, and click on the arrow to move it up or down the list. Another way is to use the list view. Entries in a list block will also be displayed as separate elements in the list view instead of aggregated into a single element.
Content-only block editing
WordPress 6.1 introduces an experimental feature called content-only editing for blocks, patterns, and templates. When this feature is enabled, users can only change the content inside a group of blocks, patterns, or templates. The idea is to prevent users from accidentally breaking the page layout or changing the styles.
At the time of this release, content-only editing is not accessible from the Visual editor interface. You would need to use the Code editor interface to enable it. You can do this by navigating to the 3-dot menu at the top right of your post editor and selecting “Code editor”. The next step is to set the templateLock attribute to contentOnly like in our example below.
You can enable the content-only editing feature in the code editor interface
You’ll notice that when content-only editing is enabled on a group of blocks, the sidebar changes as well. You won’t see the usual controls but a list of blocks included in the group. You can select any of those blocks by clicking on the block in the editor or on the corresponding item in the sidebar. If you have the list view open, clicking on this group of blocks in the list view will prompt the toolbar to appear. Clicking on the “Modify” button will temporarily disable content-only editing and bring back all the design tools.
Performance improvements to the WordPress platform
This release brings some significant performance improvements and many smaller ones to the WordPress platform. More than 25 tickets were dedicated to making WordPress faster and more efficient. If you want to learn about these enhancements, we’ve written a dedicated post about the notable performance improvements in WordPress 6.1. Check it out!
All in all, performance improvements are always welcomed by the community. They indicate that WordPress as a platform is getting faster and becoming more efficient, which is beneficial for SEO. Since search engines tend to favor fast websites with good user experience, the more efficient WordPress becomes, the more advantages WordPress sites have when competing for a spot in the SERPs.
Other small improvements and enhancements
Cross-device preference in the post editor
In the sidebar of the post editor, you can select preferences for how your editor should look when you’re working in this environment. For example, some people like to focus on the block they’re working with, so they select the “spotlight mode†in the view setting. Unfortunately, these preferences are only saved locally in previous WordPress versions. A bit inconvenient for those who use multiple devices, if you ask us. WordPress 6.1 enables cross-device preferences so your settings are saved and you’ll have the same editing experience on other devices.
Small changes and additions to the post editor
The UI of the post editor gets a small update in this release. The following changes and additions won’t have a big impact on your workflow, but you might take some time to get used to them:
The Preview button becomes “View“
There’s a new “time to read” feature in the “Details” section of the top bar
The previous “Status & Visibility” section is now “Summary“
The new “Summary” section now contains the post’s URL, post format, and template
Block parts to use in classic theme
The post editor of WordPress 6.1 gets a new section called “Template parts”. Basically, you can create templates for parts of a page, export those templates, and use them in a classic theme. WordPress 6.1 lets you create template parts for the comment section, header, footer, post meta, and general templates that are not tied to any area.
Though this new feature seems useful, it’s quite cumbersome in practice. You would need to do a bunch of things to make the template parts work on a classic theme. Should you want to test this feature out, you can find instructions and resources in this thread.
Time to update your WordPress to get the latest features, improvements, and security updates! To ensure the update works as intended, make sure to test it on your staging site to see if there are any conflicts with your themes or plugins. Happy updating!
When embedding a YouTube video on your website, you’ve probably discovered a minor but very annoying issue: YouTube embeds are not natively responsive. This means that when you’re viewing your web page on a mobile device for example, the video doesn’t properly resize with the rest of the page elements. This can negatively impact your website’s design and usability. So why does this happen, and what can you do about it?
Why YouTube videos aren’t responsive
Standard YouTube Embeds, such as the one below, use iFrames to generate an embedded video player:
The advantage of using iFrames? It’s a straightforward piece of HTML. Plus, it allows YouTube embeds to be compatible with the broadest possible selection of use cases, applications and content management systems. YouTube can also update existing video embeds with, for example, new player styles or advertising scripts from the server side without requiring users to change the code on their websites. This works because an iFrame essentially acts as a window to a different page.
Videos sometimes don’t display properly at certain screen sizes. The video above doesn’t fit inside the screen.
But there’s also a downside. Using iFrames can make YouTube videos slower to load on any given page. It could also mean that the videos aren’t always visible on first-paint, since a browser needs to find and load the iFrame before being able to load the video. Finally, and more frustratingly, without CSS or Javascript, there isn’t a native way to make YouTube videos adapt to a container. Which is why the embed specifies a size (560 x 315 by default).
As a consequence, to make a YouTube embed truly responsive and optimized for mobile display, you need to do a bit of extra work. Luckily, there are several simple mays to make it happen.
Method 1: With a bit of custom CSS
The simplest way of using CSS to create responsive embeds is to create a class that features the property “aspect-ratioâ€. This property allows you to stipulate the aspect ratio of the class you are creating, such that it’s always resized within a container along that aspect ratio. Given that embeddable YouTube videos are all presented with a 16×9 aspect ratio, this means you can use the property to ensure everything scales accordingly.
Let’s look at how method one works.
First, create a class such as “youtube-video”. Next, give it the property aspect-ratio set to 16/9 with the width at 100%.
This method is very simple for anyone comfortable editing basic CSS and HTML. However, it does require some work for each individual YouTube embed. This is less than ideal, especially for websites with multiple authors and editors who likely all try to embed YouTube videos in pages and posts.
Method 2: With Gutenberg Blocks in responsive themes
Some WordPress themes, such as Inspiro and responsive, have features that automate responsiveness for video embeds. So if you’re open to changing your theme and templates, it’s a simple matter of installing one of these. These themes have a CSS rule similar to method one that is baked into the theme. This rule will then be applied to certain blocks, and featured within the theme.
In other words: If you use the “video” Gutenberg block, where you paste in the URL of the YouTube video you want to embed, your videos will remain responsive.
However, be sure to test out these themes with your website first. The specific implementation may not work perfectly with your videos.
Method 3: With the Yoast Video SEO Plugin
If you’re a WordPress user, the simplest and fastest way to solve this problem is with the Yoast Video SEO plugin. In addition to automating the inclusion of metadata, which gets your videos ranking in Google search results, JavaScript automatically resizes the video embed for any device and browser size. Beyond just the container size, the video will adjust its height and width as the page scales. So you don’t need to worry about implementing custom CSS or tiresome browser testing!
In addition, the Yoast Video SEO plugin uses asynchronous JavaScript to speed up loading times for YouTube videos as much as possible. This ensures that your videos are delivered in the best way possible to guarantee high play rates and engagement. The plugin is $79 a year, takes just a couple of minutes to install and set up, and ensures you never need to worry about responsive videos ever again.
Summary
Videos are a great tool to use on your website. People love them! But if they don’t scale with the rest of your site, they can look clunky. Luckily, there are multiple ways to ensure that your embedded videos are responsive. Either with a bit of custom CSS or by installing a useful plugin like Yoast Video SEO, you can make sure your YouTube videos resize properly. You can also opt for changing your theme to one that has automatic video responsiveness. If you have any further questions or suggestions, please leave them in the comments.
, is now rolling out for all users!
