First thing to do is speed up my website. From my online searches it is pretty clear that google uses page speed as a factor in ranking a website. Instead of making you read the entire post, here is a video of me checking the load time where I have a caching plugin installed and then where i have disabled the plugin. The one i use on this site and my quantitative finance training courses site is WP Rocket.
It is a remarkable difference in loading time!
The observant amongst you will have noticed that with WP Rocket installed I downloaded 23 files from my hosting server and without it I downloaded 43 files. That is an extra 20 files! This has a big impact on the load time. The settings i have under File optimization for my CSS files means I minimise (minify) the CSS file size and combine them so I have fewer to download. I do the same for the Javascript files as described in the settings below.
Another thing i do is use a CDN to deliver my images. I use amazon cloudfront to deliver my images and any video content I want to show comes from vimeo which is super convenient for me. In the video the CDN was enabled when i was testing the page load time with the caching plugin enabled and without it.
