Page Speed: SEO Mythbusting

what do you think I like misconceptions about page speeds and especially is page speed in ranking well a lot of people think that it's a big ranking factor in fact I was literally looking at a document that a company had produced as its document actually talked about SEO and you had section on SEO which is good there at least I'm thinking about it but the first thing they listed was paid speed and they were actually quite insistent in the write-up that it was the most important ranking factor oh no and and I was like okay

I've got to find the right way to tell them that I want them to deal with this because it's really important and it's clearly impact user engagement and conversion ya know it doesn't mean you're gonna move up three spots right [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of SEO myth busting with me today is Eric anger and would you like to introduce yourself because you're doing so much stuff what is it that you're doing well you know I'm a general manager of part of the digital marketing team at Perficient digital and altogether we

do let's see SEO content creation content marketing pay-per-click analytics conversion rate optimisation trainings Twitter conference speaking that's a fair amount of stuff to keep us in a fair amount of stuff to keep us busy but today we're gonna get busy talking about page B it's a great topic as so many people get it wrong oh yeah is it quite a deep topic as well yes so what kind of questions do you have around ranking factor space trade speed and page speed in general so let's actually start in general and just talk about why page speed

is important how's that sound ah sounds fantastic I think if you look at what you're trying to accomplish is you're trying to accomplish that you're building a good website for your users right right so now how many times have you been on the metro or in a car or somewhere in the like countryside where you didn't have fantastic reception on your mobile phone and you basically just like really quickly trying to find something out and it just took ages for the content to actually show up that's painful isn't it it is painful and in fact

on some sites that can happen when you are in a place where you're perfectly strong yeah yeah and that's that's not that's so frustrating right and you don't want to frustrate your users right and we as a search engine do not want to have users frustrated when they like see content so for us it makes sense to consider fast web sites a little more helpful to the users then very slow web sites right it does make sense and I guess my thought process in this has always been that well yes it's likely that you're using

at some levels of ranking family but you can't make it such a strong ranking factor that you won't show the most relevant content yeah absolutely so yeah if you have bad content if you are the fastest website out there but the Coenen is not great then that's not helping you right right I mean to get the content you don't want quickly it's probably not what the users exactly like I have a blank website it's the fastest website ever yeah well mines so but it does make sense to consider it at least at some level and

there's actually a fun pair of statistics I think they're both from Google one is that something like 53% of sessions are abandoned if it takes longer than 3 seconds for the page to load and then the companion statistic is and I think it's a little bit all but still the average page takes fifteen point three seconds oh what a frightening combination is frightening it's finding in it it's so many different factors right sometimes it's slow servers but sometimes it's just like the server responds really quickly but then there's a ton of JavaScript that has to

be processed for some JavaScript is a very expensive resource because it has to be like fully downloaded and then parse and then executed right but yeah so we keep seeing this and everyone knows this and anecdotal evidence is there as well like you have studies you have the anecdotal evidence of you sitting in front of the website going like ah and I just imagine being on a metered connection where you actually pay by megabyte when you fly or something is like you can buy 20 megabytes for 10 euros or something and you're like oh okay

open one website you said what was it 15 megabyte is D is the average or something that involves 15.3 50 second yes but yeah so they you can't just imagine like how much data you were pulling in these 15 seconds yeah in fact I did see I really was looking at this Jes yesterday there is these data from think with Google where vary by market sector it shows the average web page size and they're all even the megabytes market and I think your recommendation is 500k bytes or well fewer the better the few of the

matter really right and just think about it like I grew up with entire video games on like two or three floppy discs which each fit like a megabyte and and a half or something so you know why are we doing this on the web now hmm what a great idea well maybe we should help people speed their sites up what do you think that's the thing and that's why ranking these my speed is also an important factor but as you say like content still is king like there's no question about that right absolutely how do

you think people are thinking about page speed as a ranking factor is like what are they what are they trying to do when when they are trying to optimize for it so well in terms of what they try to do I think there's a few things that people are really good at thinking about related to page speed so I think almost everybody recognizes that images are a potential issue and you know certainly pre sizing the image rather than making the browser do it for example and things like that and and and so they get to

that first level of optimization right but I think there's other things that they find a lot more difficult so for example the idea of not loading the content below the fold until the content above the fold present of course that's a little harder to implement and we have native lazy loading for images now so that's something at least yes it is something and then I think another thing that they have trouble with is and you actually mentioned in a moment ago the idea that the the way you're hosted and the way your CDN is set

up can be big factors if those aren't actually set up properly first of all they might not have the CDs oh yeah but now you may have it and it may not be properly configured as well laughing and stuff we've seen all of this yeah exactly and and then it could be as simple as I need more memory in my web server or or you know a dedicated server when I'm on a shared server connect well that sounds pretty solid but is there any misconceptions of youth that are going on like what's happening here where's

this coming from is that true so I do think maybe I could stick the myth almost as an inverse is there there too focused on just a few surface level factors oh yeah and they don't realize there's other layers there's layers to this yes although there's another thing I can suggest actually as a myth if you will which is if I go into and get my lighthouse tools report on a page and and I see it says oh this will cut six seconds out of the load time and then they do that thing and the

page didn't speed up by six seconds and I don't think people realize that some of these things are threaded oh yeah so yes I did something good but I have four other problems that off yes so I do see a lot of people getting some interesting on that yeah and lighthouse is a tricky one to begin with because people are getting confused by the idea that what they're seeing in lighthouse is what what users are seeing and that's not the case because you are literally testing from your machine from your browser from your internet connection

and not necessarily what really where people are experiencing when they're on their mobile phones on a spotty connection out there so I think it's important to remember lighthouses lap data all right and it makes predictions on what you can improve but that doesn't necessarily mean that whole now you're all doing fine do you also think that people are paying too much attention to the scores itself because I hear that a lot yeah so like the Moose is like oh no we were using the lighthouse score for ranking that's not happening that's not what we're doing

right no exactly in fact they get too attached to that's cool and sometimes it misleads them and thinking that they're doing just fine when they actually still have problems yeah and another area that I see people running into is it works fine from my phone but the user doesn't have such a nice phone so you have to remember that there's different devices yeah and you could see that in Google Analytics you can actually figure out what devices you were seeing site and then you can specifically try to understand it best way would be to buy

one of the phones that is most prevalent on your site yes I like have a look very interesting yeah and I actually shared a slide in one of my presentations recently which showed data actually you first CNN on processing and it was around three seconds for the high-speed phone but by the time you get to a user with a less than $100 phone it was you know yeah seconds to load and you just really need to remember that you know the users have all different all the other device yes yeah probably wanna do a good

job by the great majority and absolutely and you wanna may be aware that a slow phone on a slow connection is like the worst situation you can probably run into in this kind of situation and you can use things like webpagetest to get a better feeling for how that was feel like you can test from different locations or different network connections okay I would definitely recommend doing that yeah that there's so much more that you can do and also if you have a website that is listed in chrome user experience report or crux yes then

definitely use that as well and I think not many people are trying that out right well it's good to get real real real data real user metrics absolutely yeah absolutely well in fact you can broaden that piece of advice of well beyond the page speeding on recession not no way it relates to all manner of aspects of things around mobile for example because we have everybody who designs for a desktop and then yeah has to slam that down into a mobile phone format maybe designed for the mobile and then it's kind of easy to figure

out how to run it so yeah yeah exactly but for the page speed conversation absolutely you just have to do that definitely right and yeah I mean it's it's such an important thing and people do you remember the entire controversy where people are like amp is a ranking factor oh my yes it's not and then people are like button mmm-hmm and page speed pasted into that as well right em gives you a certain expectation that you can have for your sites in the search results and I've seen good fast websites rank higher than the ambivalence

so they mmm maybe maybe it is not the most important ranking factor but it's definitely an important one as in like page speed is an important ranking factor right and not so much emphasis like this little batch that gives the user an expectation that they can have about it but page speed does matter for your users and it does matter for your conversions as you said sometimes it's configuring your CDI getting a CDN configuring your CDN making sure that caching is done right and making sure that you architect your websites and web apps in the

way that they're they are fast by default right if you can do that without amp then that's fantastic amp is a fantastic toolkit to help you do that if you don't know how yeah and you could go with progressive web apps as well by the way yes very nice because of their ability to preload content into hash on your phone so a lot of time the user requests the page it's continuously yeah yeah that's true yeah so that's another way to skin a cat no I'm not supposed to say that that's a really uncomfortable uncomfortable

for cats yeah so take it the way I meant it yeah so any anything else around PageSpeed where you're like what's happening there any questions you have on PageSpeed I mean really I guess it's reasonable to person if there's not any prospect of Google dialing up that ranking notch it's basically you're kind of set with what you've done I mean I know that algorithms change all the time label will say all the time but but just from the logic perspective the issue that we talked about already between the relevance of the content being well content

yeah and it's still gonna be king absolutely right result you want the relevant cost you have five right results and maybe not just something up yeah like if you have if you have two results that are basically doing fine content wise we would probably get the one that is faster more for prominence and yeah and also I think it's important to understand that we're not doing it by score or light house or something like that yes it is more we're bucketing pages into like this is a programmatically slow 1 this is an okay one and

this is a fast one you see that in the speed report as well in the search console right so I think people need to just like figure out if they have really slows pages that how to make them faster and probably affair in the middle bit you also want to go to the fast bit but it doesn't matter if you have a lighthouse score of 90 or 95 that doesn't really difference alright Eric thank you so much for being here and talking all the things space speed with me that was amazing and I hope that

everyone liked it and leave comments and likes with us and thank you very much yeah hope you all enjoyed it I hey everyone so next episode is gonna be with my fantastic guest Rachel Costello and Rachel what have you brought for us we're gonna be talking about canonicalization and URL deduplication sounds really cool don't miss it see you then