How to Optimize Website for High Rankings: 8 Expert Tips
Search engine optimization is one of the cornerstones of digital marketing. Today, when most people explore brands and products on Google, making sure your site appears high in search results is the only way to capture prospects and thrive in a competitive market. However, while many brands focus first of all on on-page SEO and keywords, you need to know that if you don’t optimize website technically, you can’t maximize the outcomes of your SEO efforts.
How does technical SEO affect your position in search results? And how do you make the most out of your site’s performance? This guide will answer these questions and give you a step-by-step roadmap to success!
How Does Site Performance Affect Your Website Search Engine Ranking?
When we speak about search engine optimization, most people think of keywords, content, and link-building in the first place. While all these things matter a lot, the technical performance of your site is no less important, though often overlooked.
Technical performance affects your rankings firstly through direct ranking factors like Core Web Vitals and mobile-friendliness. Additionally, it affects:
- User experience
- Traffic
- Bounce rates
- Engagement
Simply put, the way your site performs directly affects how comfortably and pleasantly users will interact with them, which can affect your overall brand image, engagement, loyalty, and, hence, rankings.
Top 8 Website Performance Optimization Techniques to Use in 2025
Now that you have a general understanding of the importance of technical performance for your SEO, let’s see how to optimize website for maximum benefits.
1. Conduct a Performance Audit
Before you start making steps in web performance optimization, you need to have a detailed outlook on the unique technical errors present on your website. Otherwise, it will be the same as going blindfolded, which can make you waste too much time and perform many unnecessary actions that don’t yield.
A complete site audit will help you see which technical aspects of your website are within the general standard and which require special attention for improved rankings. Luckily, conducting it is easy with all-rounded SEO platforms that have a site audit feature. One such tool is Semrush. However, you can also pay attention to Semrush competitors to find the most suitable solution that meets your budgetary requirements and other needs. Once you make your choice, run a full audit to detect errors that you can fix.
2. Improve Your Site’s Loading Speed
After an audit, one of the first things you want to improve on your site is its loading speed unless, of course, your site already loads quickly. In case you are wondering how important is page speed for SEO, here are the two core reasons:
- Slow loading speed can drastically increase your bounce rate and hinder user experience.
- Page speed is a direct ranking factor, meaning that the faster your site loads, the higher it can rank.
Clearly, the importance of fast loading is huge. Optimizing the loading speed is a big and all-encompassing process that spans a range of actions, such as:
- Minimizing the number of HTTP requests;
- Removing unnecessary redirects;
- Implementing browser caching;
- Utilizing Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).
3. Optimize Your Media Files
Speaking of how to increase speed for better UX and SEO, we also have to mention the massive role that images play in this process. On the one hand, using media files on your website is crucial for engagement and user experience. However, when your site contains too many media files, or they are too large, it will inevitably cause longer loading.
Here are the main image optimization techniques that should help:
- Use PNG and RAW file types instead of JPEG for lossless compression.
- Compress every media file so that it weighs less and doesn’t take much time to load.
- When resizing images, remember about different screen sizes and set image width and height using relative units, such as percentage, so that your files look good both on desktop and mobile.
- Always add SEO-optimized image alt-text. First of all, this will improve user experience. Secondly, it can help your search engine rankings.
4. Ensure Mobile-Friendliness
Optimizing your site for mobile is not just one of the ways to improve its search rankings. Due to Google’s mobile-first indexing, optimizing experiences for mobile users is the only way to ensure that your website gets crawled and indexed.
To use this to your benefit, you have to create excellent experiences for all users, whether they browse your site from a desktop computer, laptop, smartphone, or tablet. Here’s how to do it:
- Build a mobile website to implement a responsive design that automatically adjusts to each particular screen.
- Make sure your site loads fast on mobile devices.
- Improve navigational elements so that users with smaller screens can easily navigate through your site without having to zoom in.
- Implement dynamic serving or create separate URLs to make sure your content displays properly for every user.
5. Improve Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals is a set of three metrics that Google uses to assess the technical performance of a website and its interaction with user requests. These metrics are used as direct ranking factors. Hence, you must measure and improve them to shine bright in search engine result pages (SERPs).
To do this, you first need to create your Core Web Vitals report to measure your current metrics and gain insights into areas that need improvements. Here’s a quick memo to help you interpret the results:
Source: Google
Alt: A table that interprets different Core Web Vitals scores
If, according to the report, you need to improve one of the three Core Web Vitals metrics, here are practical tips to do it:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- Optimize images and videos.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce server response times.
- Implement caching.
Interaction To Next Paint (INP)
- Optimize your JavaScript.
- Optimize the main thread work by avoiding recurring timers.
- Reduce the time your website takes to render visual updates.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
- Optimize your JavaScript execution.
- Set priority to essential scripts’ loading.
- If your website is built on WordPress or a similar platform, minimize the amount of third-party plugins that you use.
6. Implement Additional Technical SEO Fixes
Technical SEO is a subset of search engine optimization that handles specific technical errors. Needless to say, all its techniques and best practices are aimed at boosting your positions in SERPs, which is why it is a must-have for a thriving site.
Here are just a few technical SEO tips that can help you improve performance and rank higher:
- Duplicate content—It can confuse search engines and hinder user experience, which is why it’s recommended to avoid it.
- HTTPS—Implementing the HTTPS protocol adds security to your website and greatly improves UX.
- Broken links—Such links can significantly interrupt user journeys and negatively affect your rankings. Leverage specialized tools to detect broken links and fix them.
- Error pages—When users land on error pages, it can overwhelm and disappoint them. Hence, it’s important to monitor such pages and remove them to improve UX.
7. Assess Your Server Power
If you want to make the most out of your web performance optimization, you should never overlook the role of your current hosting provider. The truth is that even a well-designed site will likely load slowly and freeze if its origin server is slow-responding.
To eliminate the possible issue, test the speed and performance of your server and switch to a more reliable hosting provider if necessary.
8. Continuously Monitor the Results and Improve
Lastly, we have to admit that website performance is not static. When you add more pages and content, when your traffic grows, or when your servers face higher loads–these and other factors can make your performance fluctuate, which can reflect on user experience and rankings. Besides, search engine algorithms also change frequently, which can affect the benchmarks and standards that you have to follow to maintain high visibility.
Due to these reasons, we want to emphasize the importance of continuous performance monitoring and improvement. Leverage reliable analytical and audit tools to check how your website performs, detect mistakes, and make strategic improvements for long-term success.
Conclusion
The technical performance of your website plays a huge role in your success in search engines. Not only because many technical aspects are direct ranking factors. But also because how well your site performs directly impacts the experiences users receive from it.
After reading this article, you have a detailed roadmap for excellent site performance. Use the steps and tips we shared with you here to improve it and rank higher!
