There was a time when backlinks were one of the main ranking factors for any website.
But nowadays, in the AI era, backlinks are just one small factor for gaining traffic and rankings.
One of the major factors now is how you present your website to visitors and to Google.
Google will reward you with more traffic with some minor (or major, depending on your website's complexity) changes to your website.
Let’s discuss some tips today on how I was able to double traffic to many websites using these simple changes below.
Let’s do the changes one by one. You can implement these changes in the same order as discussed and see your traffic go up within a week.
Page Size
First thing is page size. Let’s divide this into further sections so you can implement these easily.
Looking at Core Web Vitals can be tricky for some people, so I will try to explain in a more user-friendly way.
You can also bookmark this article for future reference.
Image Compression
First of all I want you to change all images to .Webp on all of your website pages using our free Image to Webp converter.
Simply enter your page URL on our free Image to Webp Converter.
Click Crawl & Download.
The tool will convert all the images of any type to Webp on your page and provide a zip file in the relevant folder structure as the page.
Simply unzip the file and copy/paste the images on your root website folder.
Remove Unnecessary Javascript
Millions of people use open source software such as WordPress, Shopify etc. These are really easy to build a website upon, but they load unnecessary JavaScript on all the pages of your website.
I want you to remove all the Javascript from all the pages where it is not required.
For instance, on your homepage, you don’t need any JavaScript apart from maybe some tracking code.
Unless you have an app loading on your homepage, you wouldn’t need any kind of JavaScript on your homepage.
This task might require you to hire a developer, but it’s well worth it.
It will not only improve the load time of all the pages but also reduce the page size.
As an example, one of my websites https://www.thecanvasprints.co.uk/, only required JavaScript to be loaded on https://www.thecanvasprints.co.uk/canvas-prints or https://www.thecanvasprints.co.uk/canvas?action=upload&styleid=1, and it was loading jQuery, Bootstrap, and a lot of other JavaScript files on all the pages.
I changed the code to only load all the JavaScript files where they were required, and it reduced the page size, and I saw a visible difference in traffic after the change.
It also improved Core Web Vitals for the whole website, resulting in improved rankings and traffic.
Compress and Cache Everything
Reduce further page size by Caching and compressing your page content. Modern crawlers can read compressed content easily.
Minify HTML, CSS, and any JS on the page. All the open source sofwares have plugins that will help with this. If you don’t use open source, you can ask your developer to do it for you.
Add cache headers for static resources to load the page faster. This ensures returning visitors load from the browser cache instead of re-downloading assets.
Remove Unnecessary Fonts and Icons
Fonts and icon libraries can quietly add 300–700 KB of weight.
Fix:
- Only load the character subsets you need (latin, not latin-ext, cyrillic, etc.).
- Self-host only the font weights you use (e.g., 400, 700).
- Use system fonts for UI text if branding allows.
- Replace large icon packs (Font Awesome, Material Icons) with inline SVGs or a custom sprite sheet.
Example: Replace
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Roboto:wght@100;300;400;500;700;900&display=swap">
with:
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Roboto:wght@400;700&display=swap">
Delete Hidden DOM Elements and Widgets
Page builders and CMS templates often load hidden carousels, tabs, or tracking widgets that still add bytes.
Fix:
- Disable or remove unused components in templates (especially sliders, newsletter popups, social embeds).
- Remove old tracking scripts (Hotjar, old Facebook Pixels, etc.) that aren’t being used.
- Use Tag Manager triggers to load third-party scripts only when needed.
Quick Wins Checklist
- Convert all images to WebP/AVIF
- Lazy-load and resize
- Purge unused CSS
- Defer JS
- Compress with Brotli
- Reduce font weights/subsets
- Remove unnecessary widgets
- Enable server-side caching
Content Changes
Page Title & Meta Description
If you are doing paid marketing, you change your ads regularly to keep the visitors engaged and this is an important factor in paid marketing.
Similarly, if you change the Page Title and Meta Description of your pages regularly, you will get rewarded.
This tells Google that you are working hard on your website and trying to improve its click-through rate.
You should change these two things at least once a week, and you will see your rankings and visits going up. Try to improve it every time, and put sales offers in your page title so you can get a better click-through rate.
Page Content
You should update your page content at least once a month. This increases crawl rate as well as improves your rankings a lot.
The page content should be tightly centered around the keywords/niche you are targeting. Keep it very tight around the main topic to get targeted visitors.
Google Webmasters
At this point, I want you to go to Google Webmaster of the website and go to Insights.
Here, you can see page improvements and which pages are bringing in more traffic. You have two choices here 1) Improve existing top pages, 2) Improve existing bottom pages.
What I normally do is improve top pages and delete non-performing pages. Because if a page is not performing in a month or so, it should be removed as it is telling you that the targeted keyword for the page is not working for you, or does not have enough traffic, or has too much competition.
So you need to either update non-performing pages significantly, depending on the keyword difficulty, or remove the pages and build pages for less competing keywords.
Check all the pages here and make a decision, and update those pages. You will see instant results.
Image Names & Alt tags
If you have random image names for all the images on the page, you are losing out on the image search.
Although search engines have advanced algorithms and they can detect the type of image but it is better to give them everything on the plate.
Change your image names to exactly what the image is about and write alt tags for all the images.
Conclusion
These are only a few changes, but you need to do these for all the pages. Some changes are only required once, but the content needs to be updated at least once a month.
By doing these changes, I am able to increase the traffic and rankings for almost all of the websites I have worked with, so these are tried and tested methods.
If you need help with improving your on-page SEO, get in touch, and I would be happy to do it for you.
