You need to optimize your layout to make sure that it provides the best possible experience for readers and search engines a like. The search engines want your website to be optimized to give the user the best possible experience. If you optimize your website for the search engines you will simultaneous improve the experience for your visitors.

The most important things to make sure is that the website loads quickly and that it easy to use on all units.

Below we are going to need to look at the things you need to consider on your website.

Finished layouts that you bought or downloaded for free are almost always poorly optimized and you will have to optimize it for your site yourself. The themes you can download are made to work well on a large number of websites. You need to remove everything that is not needed on your website

Responsive design

It is very important to make sure that you website use a responsive design that scales to fit different screens. You are likely to lose a lot of traffic if your website is not able to scale to look good on mobile devices. Over 50% of all time spent online is spent using a mobile unit.

It does not matter if your website reach the top of google. Google will not show it for mobile searches unless your website is mobile friendly (scales) and you will limit your potential income a lot by not using a responsive design.

ALWAYS use a responsive design for a new sites and convert old sites to use a responsive design as fast as possible if it is still using an unresponsive design. It is an easy way to get a lot more traffic.

Enable leveragde browser caching and expiry headers

Make sure that your hosting have leveraged browser caching and expiry headers enable. This allows for a faster experience.

Make sure that your website loads quickly

It is very important that your website loads quickly. You will lose more then half of all your potential visitors if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load. You will lose a lot more visitors for every second extra it takes for your website to load. Your goal should to create a website that loads in 1 second.

Below I will assume that you have chosen a good host and a fast hosting environment. A slow host can make your website a lot slower and make it harder to succeed. I recommend that you switch to faster hosting if your website is currently on slow hosting.

Below we are going to look at a few thins that you can do to make your website faster. The things i mention below are the most important things to consider but there are a lot of other things that you can do to make your website load faster.

Optimize images

A majority of all images files contains unnecessary data that make them larger then they have to be. Optimize all images to make them smaller and allow them to load faster. You can often shave 20% or more of the size of your images. These 20% helps reduce the load speed.

Remove bloat

Most layouts that you can download or buy contains a lot of bloat. Features that are present in the theme but that you do not need. Remove all functions and all code that you do not need.

Clean the CSS file

Most CSS files will contain CSS rules that you do not need because you are not using (and have hopefully removed) certain functions. Inspect all CSS rules and remove all rules that you do not need. It is common that free layouts contain several different color schemes that you can chose to use. Each of these color schemes have their own CSS rules and a theme that allow several color schemes always contain a lot of unnecessary rules in the CSS file that you can remove to make it load faster.

Combine the CSS files into one file

Many themes have several css files. If you use WordPress and use plugins than many of the plugin will add their own CSS files. This forces the visitor to download several files before the website can render. I recommend that you combine all CSS files into one single files that contain all the CSS rules needed for the site. You can do this by copy pasting the content of the files into one new file. The search engines want you to the limit the number of files that needs to be loaded before the site is rendered.

Combine jave scripts into one file

Many layouts use several different java scripts. These scripts are usually located in separate files. Try to combine all these scripts into one single file. This is not always possible. Sometimes different scripts have to load in a certain order to work well but try to reduce the number of files as far as possible. Very small scripts can be placed directly in the HTML file.

Defer the loading of the java scripts until after the page have rendered for even bigger speed gains.

Enable keep alive

The web browser have to open a new connection and send a new request for each file it needs to get from the server. You can solve this and reduce the load time by enabling keep alive on your hosting. n.