10 Essential SEO Tips for Front‑End Developers

SEO is a huge, multi‑faceted area of Web Development. During a website build, there are decisions made at almost every step of the way that has an impact on how successful that website will be in the Google rankings; from planning out the basic sitemap and structure, figuring out cornerstone content, mobile and desktop designs, internal and external linking opportunities, hosting options, CDNs, to the languages, frameworks, and technologies chosen to actually build the site. it can even boil down to the minutiae of how the code is written and laid out.

On top of the sheer number of ranking factors that play into a successful SEO strategy, Google likes to keep its algorithm somewhat under wraps, to prevent people from gaming the system the way they used to do in the Wild West early 2000s era of SEO techniques, where paragraphs of invisible keywords would be stuffed into webpages to drive the site up the rankings.

Because SEO is such a sprawling topic, I'm going to boil it down and focus on things that ‑ as a developer ‑ can do. Below, I've collated ten essential things to bear in mind when building a website as a developer, with a focus on front‑end work.

Site Speed

When it comes to working on site speed, there are a lot of tools out there that are really helpful in diagnosing and resolving problem areas.

Personally, I would recommend using Google's own PageSpeed Insights, which can diagnose searchability issues as well as speed concerns, provides pretty clear advice on how to resolve each issue that it finds, and gives you a handy score so that you can clearly gauge how your website is performing.

If you're using Google Chrome, you can also use the in‑built Lighthouse audit tool, which will run the same tests right within your Developer Tools panel. From experience, I'd recommend running it in Incognito Mode though, just to avoid any browser extensions you may have installed throwing false positives whilst testing.

1. Optimise Media

The absolute first thing to do when you're working on improving the speed of a website is to check the media that you're using. Images and videos (even audio files, in the unusual case that your site uses those) are the usual suspects for a slow‑loading website. When you're optimising your images, it's not necessarily all about size; ensure you're using sensible file formats (.AVIF is great, but doesn't ‑ yet ‑ have good enough browser support to be your only option, for instance), and remember to include alt tags and titles to help with accessibility ‑ something we'll get into later.

Of course, if you're using a static site generator like Gatsby, then it has a very handy plugin that you really should be intimately familiar with called gatsby‑image, which will do the majority of the heavy lifting for you.

2. Review Libraries, Plugins or Frameworks

Whilst working at John Lewis, one of the biggest improvements we achieved in site speed was a thorough audit of their third‑party scripts. Over the course of months of reaching out to various stakeholders and 'owners' of these random scripts, we were able to reduce that bloat by more than 75% and in turn reduce page load times by seconds.

It's fairly unlikely that you will find yourself working on auditing libraries, plugins, etc on quite that scale, but at the same time, it is likely that you will be making use of various libraries (for instance, jQuery, GreenSock or Slick). The quickest gain here is to ensure that you are using the minified version of these files whenever possible. If possible, I would also recommend ensuring that these are hosted on your local server rather than forcing an additional external server call.

If you're running a site on a CMS like WordPress (not something I'd necessarily recommend), then you should aim to review how many plugins are in use and keep that to a minimum. It is often the case that entire libraries will be brought into a project to simply achieve a few very basic pieces of functionality which you could either extract or write yourself.

If you're working with a framework like React, ensure that you're working with SEO in mind; React and other JS frameworks can run into issues with SEO as meta‑information on sites running on these frameworks is pulled in dynamically ‑ something not necessarily helpful for crawlers, despite Google announcing in 2015 that their bot can render pages with JavaScript. There are solutions available for this issue, such as Server‑Side Rendering for React, and React Helmet.

A final consideration if you do find you have a lot of scripts loading into a page is that you can reduce the number of requests (and therefore speed up the site yet further) by combining and compressing them into a single file via something like UglifyJS.

3. Use Caching

If you're not making use of browser caching to keep your site speed down, you're missing a trick. There are a few ways to leverage caching, including setting up rules in your htaccess file, configuring caching in your hosting environment, or enabling caching through a CDN.

4. Don't Block Rendering

Sites have become a lot more complex over the past few years. Visitors and customers expect interaction, animation, interesting visual layouts and elements, all loaded at lightning‑fast speeds. One way to achieve that is by not blocking rendering, instead directing visitors straight to your site or ‑ in the worst case scenario ‑ to a loading screen; anything to avoid those long seconds of blank‑screen loading.

To avoid blocking the rendering of your site, you should aim to put all ‑‑ or as many as possible ‑‑ of your resource requests in the footer, freeing up the rest of the document to render from top‑to‑bottom without being bogged down by loading libraries, fonts, stylesheets or javascript files.

5. Improve Your Hosting

I've talked about web hosting in detail in the past. For the sake of speed improvements, improving your hosting is a great way to boost site speed. While shared servers and mass hosting is a cheaper alternative, if you're serious about getting your site off the ground and serving thousands of users a day at a decent speed, you'll want to invest more into hosting.

A dedicated solution will always outpace a shared or grid‑hosted solution.

Mobile‑Friendliness, and Accessibility

6. Mobile‑First (or at Least, Mobile‑Considered)

Mobile and tablet traffic has made up a very significant share of overall web traffic for years, growing from around 31% in 2015 to over 54% in 2021 ‑ which means you need to consider it when developing. Google considers mobile‑friendliness when ranking, and additionally, SEO is affected by the traffic you're already getting. For example, if a search engine sees a high bounce rate from your mobile users because the site doesn't work well on their device and they decide to leave again, then it's easy to see how that could hurt your position in the rankings.

Considering Mobile‑Friendliness in development is especially crucial if you're working on a refresh rather than a brand‑new build. Check the analytics of the current website, and determine how much of the traffic is mobile. This has to influence whether you build mobile‑first, or whether you focus on desktop and build responsively.

7. Accessibility

I've previously covered accessibility in web development and why it's important to consider. On top of being the right thing to do, it also provides a boost for you in terms of SEO because of the way it forces you to develop clean, logical and valid code. It also makes you consider attributes like alt tags on images, and titles on links.

Guiding Google

8. Sitemaps

Ideally, you should be planning out a clear sitemap and site structure at the start of any web project. I've always found that this helps in being able to logically lay out areas of the site, and can help with both the design and content production.

Either way, whether you plan a sitemap or not, you should be submitting an XML sitemap to Bing, Google and other search engines when your development is completed. You also should create a sitemap page on your site, laid out clearly and in a way that makes sense for both human readers (admittedly, people are unlikely to visit this page), and crawlers.

9. Robots

The robots.txt file (or meta tag) wields a pretty massive amount of power over the website you are building. Get it wrong, and there's no way you're going to have a successful site launch ‑ but get it right, and you can help guide Google and other search engines logically around your site in a way that will provide you a good boost in the rankings.

Obviously, every single site is different in terms of what they need, but typically it's a good idea to prevent crawlers from reaching pages that are private (such as password‑protected account areas and checkout pages).

10. Structured Data

Structured Data is a format of metadata that helps Google identify what your site really is, and what you're providing. It can help take some of the guesswork off the shoulders of the crawler bot by providing "explicit clues" about the content of your page, and can even help Google to generate Rich Snippets (which will take up more real estate on a results page, and boost user engagement). Google has provided a good amount of documentation on how to set up structured data, and it's absolutely something you should read through if you want to boost the SEO of the site you're working on.

The Wrap‑Up

Search Engine Optimisation is an almost endless subject. There are so many different aspects to it and it's always changing, being debated by experts online, pieced together by developers, and becoming more and more complex. It can certainly be difficult to keep up with.

For us, as developers, it is important to have a decent grasp of the basics of on‑page optimisation. It is ‑ after all ‑ what we produce.