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Unpopular Opinion: Pagespeed is Critical
I’ve seen a lot of posts lately about pagespeed not being a huge factor in SEO.
And I get it – some of my clients’ sites are on platforms that are slow (squarespace, go high level, etc) and they do well despite the bloated code.
But I completely disagree with the idea that pagespeed ia not CRITICAL to SEO success for one reason…
CONVERSIONS!
If a page loads abysmally slowly, it will hurt its traffic and conversions.
Full stop.
As SEOs, our job is to get people ranked on search engines. Cool.
But I think part of our job is to help clients profit from our efforts.
Slow page speeds hurt profitability. Which hurts our industry.
Edit: Typo.
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1 Reply
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I’m a software developer first and fully believe in page speed. Not even from an SEO pov but if your website hasn’t loaded in about 3 seconds then I’m off to the next result
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If it loads in an unreasonable time then yes you get a higher bounce rate, but it’s not a factor in respect that if a page loads slightly faster than another.
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I will say, I treat it as critical because it is one of the very few aspects of ‘seo’ where there is a measurable standard (core web vitals pass/fail), for a ranking factor.
However, it is definitely not major factor. I see many sites ranking well with slow load times and failed for both mobile and desktop.
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Page speed is a factor, but if you think shaving 0.2 seconds off your page speed is going to increase your rankings you are sadly mistaken. Page speed increase can increase user experience and user engagement and those two are way bigger ranking factors than page speed. The only time page speed really matters is if your page takes so long to load that people bounce before the page is done loading. Other than that, page speed really isn’t a big ranking factor.
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That’s my biggest selling point. We get 98-100/100 page speed scores regularly. And the other SEO agencies we white label for love it and it’s why they work with us. Incredibly fast website in the hands of a good SEO person is lighting in a bottle. Couple that with good content, backlinking, blogging, and more you got some very happy clients. Sometimes I think the people on here claiming page speed isn’t important are just coping because they can’t make websites that score well so it’s just easier to believe it doesn’t matter because they have a couple clients that are doing ok. But they could be doing great. 🤷🏻♂️ and I think that’s the thing – developers can’t design, designers can’t develop, and most SEO people can’t do either lol I’m a developer. I hire designers and SEO people to do those jobs because they matter and their expertise matters and brings value to my business. If someone can’t get good page speed scores – hire it out to someone who can. You might lose out on that sweet web design money but now you can spend that time working on more clients doing things you know how to do and actually make more money because now you’re more productive working on things that make you the most per hour. Win win.
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It’s not necessarily just the loading of the site either. But how the site behaves while the user is there.
I’ve left sites countless times because my MacBook’s fan has started going crazy, because the website’s adverts and other JS heavy elements kill performance.
User experience is part of SEO. There’s direct ranking and then there’s indirect, and I think page speed and performance feeds into both.
This new trend of saying “it doesn’t matter, let’s not bother” is just devs who want to keep using convenience frameworks at the expense of the end result. They’re looking for an excuse not to have to care about it.
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People seem to forget that Google wants to push websites that provide a GOOD user experience. SEO’s are so hung up on ranking factors that they often forget that REAL people are behind the numbers on their screen.
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It’s not an unpopular opinion, it just doesn’t really matter for ranking. Doesn’t mean it’s unimportant.
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I’m not convinced this is unpopular opinion. Most good and experienced SEO people understand the importance of a fast loading page, but as a part of the overall user experience – not in isolation. Having a fast loading page that gives a good user experience when it has loaded, with easy navigation and so on, is what matters.
As someone else has said, shaving 0.2s off page loading time isn’t going to get you to No.1, but if you did that and improved the user experience, then you begin to get to what successful SEO is all about – the cumulative impact of a LOT of factors.
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Nobody has ever suggested that a fast site is not better than a slow site.
Of course if a site is painfully slow, it is a good idea to try to speed it up.
When SEOs say that pagespeed is not a huge factor in SEO, they are talking about the people that spend countless hours speeding up a page to load in 1.2 seconds instead of 1.3 or trying to move their Pagespeed Insights score from 96 to 100.
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I lost 50% of users on a clients website, because after a plugin update the page was to slow. I fixed it now, but I have to wait until google resets the core vitals. If you depend on SEO-traffic, speed page is a critical aspect in my opinion.
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Thats because its not critical to conversions – it depends how fast/slow the site is. PageSpeed isn’t a great measure and you’re saying abysmally slow. Obvsouly abysmally slow sites WILL fail in SEO too because Google wont be able to grab the whole HTML document – you’ll see more and more partial grabs and incomplete updates due to speed.
But PageSpeed isn’t critical to SEO unless it prevents the user doing what they need – same as HTML errors
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Page speed alone does not mean much if your content and UX is terrible — however, all other things being equal faster pages will rank well. The right balance between the best content for that particular query, the best UX, the best page speed, good link profile (onsite & offsite) will get you ranking well
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No argument from me. I think everyone agrees that people won’t stick around long if a page or site takes its sweet time loading.
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There have been like 50 different studies that show that 100ms in page delay will hurt conversions rates by 1-7%, depending on your user’s typical conversion flow. e.g. if you have lots of users that convert on page 1 or 2, you are likely to see a 5% lift in your conversion rate if you can increase page speed by 500ms.
This improvement scales linearly with your median conversion page depth. So if your users most frequently convert on their 6 or 7th page then that same 5% lift becomes a 30-35% lift in conversion rate. There is almost nothing else you can do do increase conversion rate without dropping your prices.
Fundamentally if your users are bouncing before they finish converting it’s going to hurt you everywhere.
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