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What is Web Performance Optimization or WPO
Web Performance Optimization or WPO is the set of techniques, tasks, and tests aimed at improving the performance of a website in order to serve the user and search engines a URL in the shortest possible time to interact with it smoothly.
Website optimization aims to improve the performance of your website to get more traffic, increase conversions and ultimately increase revenue.
Why it is important
Users are looking for web experiences with content that loads fast, with which they can interact smoothly and from any device. And on the other hand, Google wants to serve the user the best possible information under the best possible experience.
Nobody wants to browse a website that takes a long time to load or gives latency problems.
That’s why WPO is essential to get more traffic, increase conversions and generate revenue.
Example of an Optimized Page
Below is a report for an optimized website:
As you can deduce, the best way to know if your website is optimized for Google is to go to the Google Search Console experience report.
There you will find all the aggregated details about your website and two reports:
- One for the mobile version
- And one for the desktop version.
In addition, for each one, you will be able to visualize the general evaluation of the browsing experience and all the errors detected by the search engine.
Tips to Improve Web Load Speed
In general, the user experience report will provide you with very precise detail of the problems associated with your property.
Without going into each one of them, we can offer you a list of tips that will help you, a priori, to minimize all these problems:
- Hire a good web hosting plan.
- Enable browser caching.
- Enable GZIP compression.
- Clean up excess plugins, themes and leftover code.
- Reduce HTTPS requests.
- Reduce JavaScript and CSS files.
- Optimize the weight and dimensions of images.
- Pay attention and measure the Core Web Vitals.
This last point is one of the most important.
The CWVs represent Google’s latest attempt to present simple, unified criteria for developers on what constitutes a good user experience for the search engine and where attention should be paid when optimizing a website.
In Conclusion:
Having a fast website that offers a good user experience has never been more imperative than it is today. Visitors want websites to be fast, easy to navigate, if you fail to meet their expectations you risk losing a lot of website traffic and ultimately losing your loyal users or your revenue.
Tools and recommended readings:
Frequently Asked Questions
What does WPO mean?
Web Performance Optimization, designing and implementing websites that offer the user a proper browsing experience is all Google cares about. That’s why WPO is becoming a critical piece of SEO.
How to improve WPO?
The best way to optimize a web page is to follow the guidelines that Google offers you in the Google Experience Report by analyzing the Core Web Vitals with one of the following WPO test that you will find in our article.