If you’re seeking SEO checklist which can allow you to expand your website’s organic traffic and ranking on Google, then you’ve just discovered it.

We’ve assembled the ultimate checklist which you will need to drive SEO achievement in 2021, covering best practice points and activities you will need to learn about.

In the search engine optimization fundamentals to must-knows when assessing your off-page signs, use this as a reference point for making sure that your website is sticking to best-practice which you are not being held back by problems you have missed.

Listed below are the main categories I will cover in this series:

  • User Experience SEO Checklist

  • Performance SEO Checklist

  • Technical SEO Checklist

  • Content SEO Checklist

  • On-Page SEO Checklist

  • Off-Page SEO Checklist

  • Local SEO Checklist

Performance SEO Checklist

Possess a high-performance website that loads fast and contains no flaws. Why is this important? It’s important as functionality is Not Just a ranking factor, it is also an essential factor when it comes to user experience: If a site takes too long to load people will just close it and proceed to another site. Then You’ll Find a Few tips on the best way to make sure your page is working well from a technical perspective!

Choose your Internet Host sensibly

One of the first decisions you will have to make is to choose the web host you want your website to operate on. Choosing the right platform Is Vital for your Search Engine Optimization achievement as it affects a series of Search Engine Optimization dimensions, including pagespeed, bounce speed and the overall.

In the past few decades, the apparent trend was to go with the big players in the market including Bluehost or GoDaddy. However, these big companies have a fairly hard time to provide solutions for many different needs and niches on the market.

Hence, it is not surprising that today so called boutique web hosts have conquered the marketplace. Boutique web hosts are focused on providing a web host solution tailored to the needs and demands of a Particular market, providing you both the server and the platform to establish your site.

Using one of these providers (depending on your industry) is a Fantastic choice that you must look into these days: They are publication, offer innovative technologies and usually come with great customer care.

Some recommendations:

  • Cloudways: A managed cloud hosting platform
  • SiteGround: A classic shared web hosting provider which offers WordPress
  • Kinsta – A Managed WordPress hosting solution for enterprise

Try to have your server located close to your service area

Here’s a fast hack about how to make the website of the local business faster.

If you like operate a local business in the San Francisco area, it might make feel to sign up with Cloudways, pick a DigitalOcean or Vultr server, select San Francisco as server place and there you have it! Now, when somebody visits your website, it will load super fast because there is no long back and on DNS Shift required ahead!

While this strategy works great for neighborhood companies, it obviously gets a whole lot more complicated once your service provide reaches nationwide or even international audiences. In this instance: Let me present CDNs.

Utilize a CDN

CDN is a shortcut and stands for Content Delivery Network. Based on Yoast, a CDN Is network of servers in various geographical locations working together to find content to load quicker by serving it in the location near the visitor.

Hence this is the solution if you provide your service nationwide or even internationally.

However, a CDN provides more than just hosting your own static files on servers.

Here’s a Fast overview of what CDN can perform for you:

  • deliver static content to users in a quick and efficient way
  • save bandwidth
  • help you with scale resources in case you go viral!
  • include a brand new degree of safety

Listed below are some recommended CDNs

  • BunnyCDN
  • CloudFlare
  • KeyCDN
  • StackPath

Compress your content with Gzip

Gzip is a method of compressing aka shrinking your documents that enables faster network transfers. Because of the smaller size your articles loads faster when someone accesses your own site. Even though gzip compression is a standard practice these days, you will find nevertheless some hosts that do not provide this feature by default. So Make Certain to check if it is enabled.

You can easily test for Gzip compression by checking out one of the next two apps:

In case the outcome is that you don’t have Gzip compression enabled, only reach out to your web host to activate it. If that is not possible it might be time to change to a new web host.

Check for HTTP/2

What is HTTP? HTTP is the network protocol which is the negotiation base for the exchange of all network information exchange between the user and your site/server.
It’s basically the channel that enables users to load websites.

There are two different versions of HTTP: The later version, HTTP/2 is basically a revision of HTTP/1 with major performance improvements. Your goal should be to have your server run on HTTP/2: The update is a fundamental makeover with a difference of 18 years in between the releases. The most advanced feature of HTTP/2 is that it can send several data requests over a single TCP connection at the same time. This allows you to download web files from a server via ASync mode.

Here are two tools that let you test if your website supports HTTP/2:

If the result is that your website doesn’t support HTTP/2, reach out to your web hosting provider. If your provider can’t enable this feature for you, it’s time to switch hosts.

The latest update, HTTP/3, is scheduled to be launched later this year so keep an eye out!

Embed a caching solution

Caching is the process in which the server stores the website data as static in memory , in order to be served faster. Hence, since it increases the page loading speed, it also increases user experience.

There are different types of caching out there:

  • server-side cache
  • database cache
  • object cache
  • page cache
  • CDN cache

Each type stores the data on different levels.

Having a caching solution in place should be standard for every website. Luckily, there are many solutions available that enable caching, especially for WordPress. Many web hosting providers already come up with their own caching solutions built around their existing infrastructure. Examples are SG Optimizer by Siteground or Breeze by Cloudways. These solutions are free to use especially when you are hosting your websites with the respective providers.

Among the premium plugins available, we recommend the following ones:

  • WpRocket
  • Swift Performance

Some of these plugins do more than just caching and also include website optimization powerhouses, including functions such as image optimization, CSS & JS files optimization, database optimization and more.

Minify JS/CSS files

By minifying Javascript and CSS files you will make your website smaller in size, hence, again, reducing the loading time.

A good way to do this is with one of the caching plugins mentioned above.

In this context it is also worth mentioning the Autoptimize WordPress plugin . Even though the plugin doesn’t help with caching per se, it does deal with image and files optimization.

Resize large images before uploading them.

The one factor with the most impact on the respective website size are media-rich items such as images or videos.

Often, websites contain very large images – often in “straight-from-the-camera” sizes. Frequently people don’t even consider this a problem but think about it: When you have
several 7 MB pictures on a website and a user accesses it from a 3G carrier – it becomes clear that the size is critical!

The easiest way to make sure all pictures are of adequate size is to have them resized automatically, for example by using plug-ins. For WordPress, there are several plugins that have a solution for the situation:

  • Shortpixel Image Optimizer
  • Resize Image After Upload by Shortpixel
  • Imsanity
  • Swift Performance Pro

Compress and optimize images

This point sounds similar to the previous one but we can’t stress the importance of this enough: Images have a huge impact on the size of your site (and performance!). Converting your pictures into the right format is probably around 80% of your website optimization.

Again, plug-ins are your friend! For WordPress, there are many different plugins for image optimization available, some are part of general optimization plugins, others
serve as stand-alone solutions.

Here are some examples:

  • Shortpixel Image Optimizer
  • Imagify , part of the Wp Rocket family
  • SmushIt
  • Flying Images
  • Imsanity

However, while striving for small pictures, always make sure you keep the image quality in mind. Smaller pictures means lower quality. So what is the golden middle? Try to get
the best of both worlds by going with the “glossy” approach: not too aggressive (lossy – best performance, at the cost of image quality) and not too soft (lossless – best image
quality, low performance).

Lazy Load Images and Iframes (YouTube embeds, etc.)

“Lazy loading images” (and iframes) means “loading images on websites asynchronously — that is, after the above-the-fold content is fully loaded, or even conditionally, only when they appear in the browser’s viewport. This means that if users don’t scroll all the way down, images placed at the bottom of the page won’t even be loaded.” – Sitepoint

This is a great technique to speed up a website tremendously.

And once again – there are plugins for this.

There are various options out there – reaching from stand-alone solutions to plugins that are part for general performance enhancement efforts:

  • Autoptimize (images & iframes)
  • SmushIt (images only)
  • Flying Images (images only)
  • WpRocket (images & iframes)
  • Swift Performance Pro (images & iframes)

Keep your technology up-to-date!

This is a golden rule when it comes to IT: Make sure your technology is compliant with all the latest features, updates and plugins AT ALL TIMES. This is essential for both
security and performance reasons: These days there are constantly new updates released to keep up with latest developments and security gaps. If your IT systems are
not compatible with these new features you quickly fall behind.

And a hacked website is the last thing we want – it means you lose control over your OWN website and your rank that you worked so hard for will take an immediate dip.

If you work with WordPress, make sure to regularly update WordPress core, plugins  and themes.

Also, when it comes to web hosts, don’t forget that the respective server your site runs on must be modern and in accordance with the latest technology standard as well!

Hence it should be running the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, Apache or Nginx, etc. Usually this is a given if you use a cloud web hosting platform like e.g. CloudWays or a
more sophisticated one such as Kinsta .

Optimize your database regularly

This point is specifically targeted at WordPress users. In WordPress, there is a central database that stores all your content and data, such as posts, pages and comments. However, over time, this database also piles up unnecessary “junk information” which slows it down. To ensure your database is operating at its maximum efficiency level, you will need to optimize it from time to time.

Here are some plugins for this purpose:

  • Wp Optimize
  • Optimize Database after Cleaning Revisions
  • Breeze
  • Wp Rocket
  • Swift Performance

This performance experience SEO checklist can help your business get started with SEO.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy to implement on SEO checklist on a site. It requires time, dedication, and some background SEO knowledge. At Pacelab, our team can help you check-off every to-do on your checklist.

Request a free quote online today or call us at +919717778130 to start using SEO for your website!