One lesser known factor that Google uses for ranking your website is its loading speed.  You should aim to make your website load as fast as possible so that users aren’t left waiting for results, eventually abandoning your page.  Here are some tips on speeding up your website —

1. Use services online like GTmetrix and Pingdom which help you to determine the current speed of your website.
2. If these services report issues with your website’s speed, consider adding caching to your .htaccess file.  You can use the following in your .htaccess file to enable caching:
   # BEGIN Expire headers ExpiresActive On ExpiresDefault “access plus 1 seconds” ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access plus 2592000 seconds” ExpiresByType image/png “access plus 2592000 seconds” ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus 2592000 seconds” ExpiresByType text/css “access plus 604800 seconds” ExpiresByType text/javascript “access plus 604800 seconds” ExpiresByType application/javascript “access plus 604800 seconds” ExpiresByType text/html “access plus 2592000 seconds” # END Expire headers
3. Reduce image sizes on your website.  One huge factor to website speed degradation is the use of images with large file sizes.  Try saving all of your images in a smaller file size either by reducing the actual dimensions of the images or saving them as JPEG files.