Sometimes it can be small things that dampen our SEO efforts, and while we have loads of resources for helping you with your SEO, we want to look at whether your coding could impact your SEO efforts. Today we look at JavaScript and what effect it has on SEO.
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What is JavaScript and do I need it?
Before we delve into assessing whether JavaScript affects SEO, we first need to assess what exactly JavaScript is. JavaScript is a scripting or programming language that allows a webpage to have dynamic features and makes web pages interactive. We all know in today’s connected world, a page with just text will not satisfy searchers, and for that reason, we need to add more interactivity to get them to stay on our page and indeed our website for a longer length of time rather than use a competitor. If you are a user of social media, you see JavaScript in action; for instance, when a page refreshes without you doing anything to it…that’s JavaScript.
The Internet was originally used by scientists and the like to transfer data and knowledge to each other. The world wide web had its first web pages in 1993 (text only) and remained text-based until JavaScript came out in the late 1990s and was first used on the Netscape browser. In the early days of the world wide web, the majority of web pages were static and offered little to no interaction between it and the user. While Netscape first used JavaScript, Microsoft browsers did not support JavaScript until much later. It took until nearly 2000 for JavaScript to become the main script. Today, JavaScript is used on 98% of websites worldwide and will be the programming behind certain tasks happening such as:
- Animated graphics
- Photo slideshows
- Autocomplete suggestions
- Interactive forms
- Interactive maps
- Rollover and dropdown menus
- Playing audio & video
- Loading a page without the user doing anything
JavaScript is therefore the client-side program that deals with the user interface (what the user sees). In 2020, all search engines began using the same rendering software so that web developers did not have to spend a long time and doing different things on each search engine.
JavaScript SEO is part of technical SEO where JavaScript websites are made easy to crawl, render and make them readable. If you want to read more about technical SEO, you can read our blog for more information.
How does JavaScript affect SEO?
From the above details, you can see that JavaScript is necessary for dynamic websites. While this is great, there can be some drawbacks. JavaScript can affect SEO via several pathways, crawlability, obtainability, and slow load time. Let’s look further at how this happens:
- Crawlability – JavaScript can affect a web crawler’s ability to crawl and navigate your website on a page-by-page basis. If a crawler cannot find your content, it cannot index it. Check your script to ensure that you have not blocked content from web crawlers. You can use Google’s URL inspection tool to assess if the URL might be indexable as well as request that Google indexes your page.
- Obtainability – Historically, bots were unable to crawl or index content that was dynamic as they could only see the HTML code. Nowadays, bots can crawl and index webpages, however, Google suggests that developers still use server-side rendering.
- Slow load time – As web pages need to be more dynamic, the number of features each page has increases as does the need to write more script. And the more that is on a page, the slower the page load time – not helpful when page load speed is attributable to SEO score.
How can I improve SEO with JavaScript?
You can do several things to help improve your crawlability, obtainability and load time. Here are a few suggestions:
- Avoid dynamic rendering – Google recently updated its documentation on rendering and now says, “Dynamic rendering is a workaround and not a long-term solution for problems with JavaScript-generated content in search engines. Instead, we recommend that you use server-side rendering, static rendering, or hydration as a solution.” Page rendering may cause your page to have a slow load speed. Ideally, identify any script that may be causing these problems.
- Help the search engine read your page – To help the search engine understand your page, you need to tell the crawler what your page is about. Using HTML, ensure the first response includes the title of the page, its metadata, and other data which is stored in the <head> of the page.
- Minify the amount of JavaScript – Remove any comments and extra spaces to reduce the file size. Remove any whitespaces and unnecessary comments in the source code. You can also join together two or more strings; this concat method then shows a new string.
- Remove unused plugins on WordPress – You may use certain plug-ins to perform certain tasks on your website, however, make sure you remove any that are not in use. All the extra plug-ins take up memory (space) and can cause your website to slow down and have long load times.
When looking at mobile app development, most apps run Python on the back end and JavaScript on the front (customer-facing) end.
To summise, JavaScript is not bad for SEO, you just need to make sure that it is used and implemented properly.
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Prepare for SEO take off 🚀
Take the first step to ranking higher with our free SEO audit.
Get a complete overview of optimisation opportunities and uncover the actions you need to take to scale the SERPs.
