Performance Tuning Wordpress for SEO

A few months ago at Aaptiv, we took on the task of overhauling our blog. We weren’t getting the type of organic traffic we wanted, page load times were slow, and layout designs weren’t optimized for reading and navigation. In order to fix these issues, we did several deep dives into our WordPress setup to identify points of improvement. The setup was fairly standard — a customized theme tweaked over time, and a large number of plugins. Even with a healthy cadence of publishing articles, we lacked the SEO optimizations to effectively trigger and grow organic traffic. Here’s what we learned:

There are a lot of great SEO resources

Part of this journey was to learn as much as possible about SEO, and incorporate learnings along the way. Two resources, Yoast and Moz, have proven to be tremendously valuable starting points. Yoast and Moz are companies dedicated to providing tools, guidance, and services within the SEO space. A lot of their research and learnings are made available for free.

Yoast’s WordPress SEO guide, and Moz’s Learning Center in particular are excellent starting points for optimizing a WordPress website/blog. These allowed us to branch out into hundreds of subsequent articles, guides, and search queries over time. There is no perfect recipe for achieving SEO superstardom, but following proven and well-documented basics has resulted in huge improvements to our search engine rankings and organic traffic.

There are two types of SEO

We quickly learned that there are two main branches of SEO: Technical SEO is the type that helps Google (and other search engines) read and understand your website with optimized markup, metadata, and fast load times; Content SEO is the type that helps you rank for specific topics and keywords with optimized content and site structure.

What we did for Technical SEO

Search engines have long been able to parse markup, sitemaps, and metadata, but over the years, best practices and recommendations have evolved. For instance, things like page load times and whether your site is responsive/mobile optimized will affect rankings.

A lot of tooling and documentation for SEO comes directly from Google. It’s a multi-sided system. Google creates the ecosystem, while other businesses provide specific SEO services and tooling around it for publishers. From our research, other search engines are largely influenced by Google’s practices.

Use an SEO plugin for WordPress

To start things off, we had to choose an SEO plugin for WordPress. It came down to Yoast SEO and All In One SEO Pack (more on that below). There are dozens of tools that may fit your project’s requirements, so a fair amount of research is highly recommended.

An SEO plugin typically handles generating sitemaps and metadata for your website (homepage, blog posts, content pages, etc.). When a URL to your site is shared on social media, or appears in Google search results, the metadata values are used to show the title, description, publish date, author, and so forth. XML sitemaps help search engines index your website. As new content is created, they’re either: 1) found organically by a crawler, or 2) found when your sitemap is processed by a search engine.

The alternative to SEO plugins is doing all the work manually, but there’s usually no need to reinvent the wheel. The companies behind these plugins have a vested interest in providing the best tools possible so you’re more inclined to purchase their premium offerings. For this reason, most plugins (including the free versions) are updated regularly to keep up with the changes and growing needs of the SEO world.

Why we chose Yoast SEO over All in One SEO Pack

Yoast earned our trust pretty early on with their solid library of regularly updated blog posts and guides for all things SEO. As far as benefits, features, and functionality, the decision was more difficult. There are many similarities between the two, but here’s what made Yoast’s plugin stand out for us:

• Some of our editors had previous experience with Yoast SEO.
• Built-in content analysis, providing handy suggestions to Editors about potential content improvements, such as keyword frequency, content length, link counting, and working with cornerstone content.
• Built-in breadcrumb navigation, adding valuable context of structure and hierarchy, as suggested by Google’s site enhancement guide.
• Features and settings broken out into separate sections and tabs.
• Larger plugin ecosystem of add-ons and 3rd party integrations.

Benefits of Structured Data

Structured Data uses a standardized “vocabulary” (known as Schema) that helps search engines read and understand your website. One of the benefits is specially formatted search results, which include breadcrumbs, gallery carousels, and formatted content types (articles, products, events, and more).

There are several formats of structured data that search engines look for, including JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa. Google recommends JSON-LD for structured data whenever possible. Google also has a super handy Structured Data Testing Tool that is essential during the development process. It shows exactly how Google parses your data, including errors and warnings.

Adding Structured Data is as simple as installing a plugin. With many options in the WordPress plugin directory, we selected Schema for its simplicity and minimal configuration. JSON-LD code is automatically added to the HTML, which can be verified by Google’s testing tool. We recommend researching a plugin that fits the needs of your website. Some plugins can be extended by available extensions, or by a developer for custom functionality.

Optimizing for speed and happiness

Load times are important. Back in 2010, Google published a blog post about using site speed in search ranking. Long story short, this needs to be a priority for anyone serious about SEO. You didn’t think Google was gonna leave you to figure that out, did you? Check out their PageSpeed Insights tool to help you figure it all out (compression, gzipping, minifying, redirects, caching, CDNs, expiry headers, etc.). For additional performance insight and visual breakdowns, check out the Pingdom Website Speed Test.

Quick note about these tools: Third-party integrations, scripts, and plugins may load additional local and external resources which you may not be able to avoid. As a result, your performance scores may appear lower than they would be otherwise.

As our blog’s traffic and reader engagement grew steadily, several upgrades were made along the way to help boost and/or maintain load performance. This includes bumping the server’s memory capacity, CPU cores, PHP version, and eventually spinning up a second server. Load balancing traffic spikes between two servers helped mitigate dips in load and response times. Learn more about TTFB (time to first byte).

In addition to SEO rankings, speed can be a strategic advantage to a business. Fast websites lead to happier visitors and higher conversion rates.

A bit about caching

Caching is fundamental to load times. One of our goals was to boost server operation efficiency. Less work for the server translates to higher output at the same cost. Redundant behind-the-scene tasks can be significantly reduced for WordPress, web browsers, and servers — often without too much effort.

A server can be configured to serve content with HTTP cache headers. These headers instruct the browser on how to cache resources (such as images, CSS, JavaScript) so a returning visitor won’t have to re-download assets that likely didn’t change. This positively impacts users with capped data and internet speeds.

WordPress caching, typically enabled by a plugin, plays a major role in achieving quick load times and navigation snappiness. When loading a page, WordPress determines what content is being requested, queries the MySQL database for said content, generates the full page HTML markup, and then sends it up to the browser. A caching plugin will store this generated HTML as a static file. When the same request is made thereon, WordPress serves up only the HTML file, bypassing the aforementioned steps.

Since WordPress is built with PHP, we also utilized OpCache, a cache engine that reduces repetitive work performed by the server. To help elaborate, here’s an excerpt from Understanding OpCache by Jacek Barecki:

As each PHP script is being compiled at runtime, a part of the execution time gets used for transforming the human readable code into code that can be understood by the machine. A bytecode cache engine like OpCache, APC or Xcache does it only once — during the first execution of a specific PHP file. Then the precompiled script is being stored in memory, which should lead to performance boosts in your PHP applications.

What we’re doing for Content SEO

Aaptiv’s editorial team has been doing an incredible job with consistently producing awesome content around health, fitness, and wellness. Community engagement is rapidly increasing. Members are sharing our articles and resources with each other and their social networks.

For more insight, I’ve asked Aaptiv’s Director of Content Strategy, Bethany Cantor to share her thoughts:

The easiest way to break down our content strategy is that we’ve taken a three-pronged approach. We’ve invested deeply in the idea that you can write in a way that is optimized for SEO without sacrificing the quality or authenticity of your content. The first aspect of our strategy has always been to uncover clusters of keywords that have been largely neglected by larger outlets and to deliver the highest quality content on those topics.

The second aspect of our strategy has been to make the content reader friendly — often you get either very technically-worded, SEO-driven content with no heart or voice or you get all voice and no optimization. We’re giving the reader sound bites — takeaways that are immediately applicable to daily life.

Last but certainly not least, all our content goes through rigorous inspection before being published. We optimize for search and readability. Nothing makes it out the door without passing those tests. I teach everyone on my team about SEO even if they don’t touch that area of study everyday. It’s vital that they understand, as content creators, that what they put out there has a ripple effect. I always say if you’re not telling your story, someone else is.

We’re still very early in the game, and super excited see how things evolve as our strategy manifests. There are indicators of early success — average monthly organic traffic has quadrupled since April 2017, huge ranking improvements for relevant keywords, decreased bounce rate, and users spending 2x more time per session on the blog. Using Google Analytics and Search Console, we’re able track search phrases and keywords that drive users to Aaptiv, and how they navigate our content.

We’ve got exciting plans for 2018, and we’re looking forward to sharing our story with you as we continue learning and implementing new ideas!