Learning SEO from the basics and teaching compression of codes and files on the site
Learning SEO from the basics and mastering its principles is essential to increase website traffic and earn money. In today’s digital age, millions of websites compete for visitors. Entrepreneurs and business owners who want to get their website to the top of search results at the lowest cost should learn the basics. Also, marketers, advertising managers, content writers, and anyone interested in website design should not ignore learning these topics.
In basic SEO training, website optimization and how to implement its strategies are discussed. Things like informing about the product, increasing website traffic, brand awareness, making money, reducing website costs, better audience understanding of the content, and other issues make people take SEO training seriously.
Many techniques are proposed in SEO. One of these techniques is the compression of website content. Compressing the codes and files is important in getting search traffic and helps increase the content’s loading speed. In the rest of this article, content compression and its role in website optimization are described.
Steps to compress website files
Compressing website files is a great way to increase search engine rankings. Compression is usually done in three stages. In the first part, files with a special format are compressed; in the second part, public encryption at the HTTPS level takes place. Finally, compression occurs at the connection level (between two nodes of an HTTPS connection).
The importance of compressing website files
In SEO training, people must answer some questions from the beginning. For example, why should the website code and files be compressed? Does compressing text, videos, and images increase website speed? How does this website optimization technique reduce hosting costs? If the website content loads faster, the user experience will be better.
This way, it positively affects performance indicators such as bounce rate, conversion rate, duration of visiting pages, etc. Increasing the conversion rate is an important indicator of success in sales and e-commerce. For example, according to research, content loading delay can reduce about 1% of Amazon’s big website sales.
Based on this, it is predicted that Amazon will lose about 250 million dollars in one fiscal year. These numbers show the importance of website loading speed and file compression. Also, according to the results of one of the studies related to the relationship between sales percentage and content download delay, every one-second delay in website loading reduces the number of visitors by 11%, reducing sales by 7%.
Regarding customer satisfaction, they have concluded that every second delay in site loading leads to a 16% decrease in audience satisfaction. Because wireless network coverage still faces challenges, and mobile Internet is often slow. The speed of downloading site content is more important for mobile phone users to search the Internet. Attention to this SEO technique causes the user’s requested data to be compressed and the content transfer time to be reduced.
The importance of compressing site codes
Partitions of a website, such as a header, footer, and sidebar, are loaded on all pages. If the amount of coding is heavy, it will reduce the loading speed. In this way, the user waits a long time for the website to open, which is unpleasant for many people. Usually, bugs and errors in the codes of a website are checked online with W3C Validator, and users’ waiting time (TTFB) can also be analyzed with Google’s Chrome Developer Tools. After analyzing the website, other online tools like Walmart and WP Rocket can be used to compress its codes.
Website performance, data transfer speed, and file downloads are among the most important factors that Google and other search engines consider for ranking SERP (Search Engine Results Page). So that a website will rank higher faster, applying this SEO strategy will change the website’s ranking due to increased visitor traffic, impact on performance, and increased speed.
Algorithms for compression of website files and codes
There are several tools for this specialized task, and compression algorithms with data changes are usually more efficient than algorithms without changes. Collections called Gzip, Deflate, and Brotli are the most common technologies used to compress files. Gzip and Deflate methods are suitable for compressing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files because they can be implemented quickly.
Also, tools such as YUI Compressor, JSMin, and Google Page Speed Insights are suggested to compress CSS codes. TinyPng is a free online tool to reduce the size of images in PNG format. On this website, it is possible to upload an image file and compress it in just a few seconds. TinyJPG and JPEGmini are other sites suitable for JPEG format images.
Types of website file compression
Compression algorithms are divided into two types with data change (Lossy Compression) and without change (Lossy Compression). In the first type, the original data changes very little. Compression of video format and JPEG format of images is of this type. The data does not change in the second type and completely matches the original version. This is how to compress images in PNG and GIF formats.
End-to-End compression
End-to-End compression is the best way to improve website performance, usually covered in SEO training. The server performs this method and is of the compression type without change. All current browsers and servers support this compression method. The important thing about End-To-End compression is that it is only used for text.
Important tips about compressing website content with Gzip
If Gzip is installed on a website’s content management system, users will quickly receive files and content. However, it should be noted that Gzip only compresses website content in HTML, JS, and CSS formats.
The size reduction of these files is up to 70%, which greatly impacts website speed and bandwidth consumption. To enable Gzip in the WordPress content management system, the plugins (WP Rocket) and (W3 Total Cache) must be allowed to add (.htaccess). In addition, to activate Gzip in the Joomla content management system, selecting the YES option in the Gzip Page Compression section is sufficient.
For compressing files with Gzip, any security flaws can cause problems with the information in the files. Therefore, this method is not recommended for compressing sensitive information files. Also, compression with Gzip cannot be applied to contents that are only a few bytes in size or have already been compressed. This will have the opposite effect, and the output file will be larger than before.
