A Journey to Improving SEO ranking.
How I Improved the SEO of My Website With GatsbyJS and AWS
A critical journey to improve my website’s SEO. Here is how I did it.
Here’s my 2-month long journey going from an Alexa ranking of 6.7M to a ranking of 2.1M (lower is better). This is a 4 671 803 increase in my Alexa ranking. We will discuss strategies I used to make this happen. For instance, moving to static websites, hosting migrations, and performance tweaking. While 2.1M is not the best ranking on Alexa, it is a significant step up from 6.7M.
The website discussed in this article sells software plugins for the MyBB forum software. I was once on the developer team of this open-source software.
How I Got Started
I needed a front-end for displaying my products, a back-end, and a customer area for buying and downloading products.
Front-end Technologies
I chose the following technologies while thinking of user experience, cost, and speed. I made the front-end using React and a beautiful template that I Reactified. React is a very useful tool for providing a beautiful user experience. Updates happen without having to reload the browser, which makes it very smooth.
Solving the React SEO problem
There were a few options to ensure my fully fledged React site gets fully indexed by search engines.
Server-Side Rendering React
One solution is to server-side render the React application. But, this would make the development a lot more complex and also ramp-up the costs, while this is not necessary for a small and purely static website.
What About Static Websites?
Static websites are fast, handle SEO very well, and are easy to work with overall. I then investigated the different options.
- Building a static website in HTML was a no-go. I was not willing to…
