Optimizing Your WordPress Website in 2023 means having the most stylish and beautiful website in the world- but that doesn’t mean a thing if you’re the only one who visits it. You don’t want to be all alone admiring your website. Of course, you can pay for traffic by advertising on social media or other platforms. But would you like to spend thousands of dollars in advertising fees when you can get highly qualified and FREE traffic from Google? Probably not.
This is why search engine optimization, or SEO, is crucial for online businesses. You may be a blogger, an affiliate marketer, or an online store owner, and I think you’ll agree with me when I say that search engine traffic is the best source of traffic.
Here are a few ways you can optimize your website for search engine traffic:
- Use a fast-loading theme
There are thousands of themes to choose from on WordPress.org. However, most of them will be slow. Google loves fast-loading sites, and you’d hate to find out your theme is causing your site to load slowly on people’s computers.
- Add a sitemap
Help search engines crawl your website content faster to add it to their database. The earlier your content gets crawled, the quicker your site appears on search engines.
- Install a caching plugin
There are several free caching plugins you can choose from. How it usually works is that it will generate a static HTML file of your web pages. This means your web server will no longer have to serve all your website files to each visitor. The static HTML files are lightweight, loading your site faster on your visitor’s browser.
- Use human-readable permalinks
The SEO-friendly format recommended by search engines makes it easy for people (and search engines) to understand what your content is about. The most common format used by SEO-optimized websites is the post-name permalink format. WordPress gives you a few options for how you want your permalinks to appear.
- Install a good SEO plugin
Yoast and All In One SEO Pack are the most popular SEO plugins. Choose which one you’d like to install, configure it properly, and you’ll have an excellent SEO-optimized website soon.