Page speed and SEO, how and why to optimize the speed of the pages

Eric Enge – one of the authors of the huge volume The art of SEO, and general manager of Perficient Digital – is hosted by Martin Splitt in the third episode of the second season of SEO Mythbusting on Youtube. The two discuss a topic that is becoming increasingly central to Google and our strategies: the speed of the pages and its impact on SEO, and stop to analyze what are the most difficult aspects for webmasters and site owners.

Why page speed is important

In the long chat, Splitt and Enge first discuss the importance of page speed in the current context of the Web, and then get to define which is considered a “good” speed of the pages and describe some of the interventions and techniques that can improve this parameter.

But first of all, matching the title of the show, Enge explains from his point of view what is the first misunderstanding that there usually is on this topic, meaning that page speed is a fundamental ranking factor: surely it can impact on metrics and user engagement, says the expert, but it is not only by improving the speed “that you will climb up three positions in the SERP”.

How to consider page speed

Page speed is a big and deep topic, especially because many people do not fully understand it and make mistakes. A useful approach to this topic is to question the goal you are trying to achieve with your work, namely “build a good site for your users“, as Martin Splitt says.

The Googler describes the importance of speed starting from some real life situations: “It’s painful when you’re on the subway, in the car or somewhere in the countryside and your smartphone does not have a good signal, but you need to look for something on the fly and it takes a long time to really load and read the content. For some sites, the same thing can happen even in the city and with perfect signals, with extreme frustration“.

So, it is never good to create frustration in users, synthesizes Splitt, and Google as a search engine does not want “frustrated users when they see contents”, and therefore it made sense “to think that fast websites are a bit more useful for users than very slow sites”.

Page speed and ranking for Google

The explanation convinces Eric Enge, who adds that he imagined that “Google probably somehow uses page speed as a ranking factor, but it can’t be a stronger signal than content”. Splitt confirms, saying that if a site “is the fastest ever, but has poor and low quality contents, it does not offer help to users” and Google obviously takes these aspects into account.

Speed is important and should also be taken into account in terms of ranking, and in this regard Enge refers to some “chilling” statistics: something like 53 percent of sessions are abandoned if the loading of the page exceeds 3 seconds and – perhaps a bit old piece of data, as admits the GM of Perficient Digital – the average loading of a page is 15.3 seconds.

A complex element to assess

One of the problematic aspects of page speed is that it depends on many elements: “Sometimes they are slow servers, other times the servers respond very quickly but there is a lot of Javascript to process first, which is a wasteful resource because it must first be fully downloaded, analyzed and then executed,” recalls Splitt.

And there are other aspects to consider: “Imagine having a paid connection – for example, if you are flying or something like that – and then paying for example 10 euros for 20 megabytes of navigation: think about how much data you are extracting in those 15 seconds of loading!”.

Enge adds that the average page size is much higher than the share recommended by Google – which is about 500 k-bytes or less – while in all market sectors it exceeds (and by much) the megabyte. The Googler notes that “less is better”, but that’s not always the case in the Web ecosystem, and this has prompted Google to include page speed among ranking factors, even if the warning “content is king” is still valid.

How to optimize the site’s page speed

But what are the interventions that can be applied to a site to improve page speed? According to Eric Enge, even those who have not fully understood the meaning of this parameter (or maybe, as he said before, considers it a crucial and primary value), know that there are some aspects to focus attention.

For instance, “I think almost everyone recognizes that images are a potential problem, so they use responsive images instead of waiting for the browser to resize them” or limit the size to avoid weighing on the upload and other image optimizations.

And this is the first level of page speed optimization.

But there are other more difficult or technical things that are not yet on the SEO priority list, such as uploading lazy images (which ensures that the below-the-fold resources do not load until the user reaches that part of the page) or the right awareness of the importance of having a good server hosting service and a correctly set CDN.

The difficulties in understanding the tools

Another problem reported by Enge – another “false myth” – concerns the use of tools to evaluate the speed of the pages and the understanding of recommended interventions to reduce page speed. The SEO expert gives an example to clarify this concept: “I connect to the tools of Google Lighthouse and a report indicates that there is a particular intervention that could reduce the loading time by six seconds; I run it, but there is no immediate improvement in speed“.

The point is that often these elements are connected to each other, and therefore working on just one aspect does not lead to the “hoped for” results: in general – almost always – we need instead a combination of interventions and changes to improve the speed of the pages for real, not just a miracle fix.

On this point Martin Splitt agrees, and admits that Lighthouse is a complicated tool and that there is often an underlying understanding error: it is a tool that uses “lab data” and therefore does not show “what users see”. In fact, “you are literally testing the speed of your pages from your machine, your browser, your Internet connection, and not necessarily what is the user experience when they are from their smartphone with a skipping connection”.

Lighthouse offers predictions about what can be improved, but that does not mean that it is enough to do that surgery to achieve the result.

Too much attention to scores

Another underlying problem is that people pay too much attention to scores as such, the Googler still says, and this leads to another unfounded myth: “Google uses the Lighthouse score for ranking“, but that is not true and it is not how things work.

“They rely too much on those scores,” confirms Enge, according to which this trust can mislead them, because it leads them to think that having a good score means that the site is in place, when instead you are still problems.

Poor consideration of differences between devices

A further critical point is the understanding of how the features of a device can influence the speed of page loading: it is a trap to think that a site is fast just because it loads quickly on your high-end smartphone.

The sites are accessed by many types of devices, which load all pages at different speeds. Thanks to Google Analytics, remembers Splitt, there is the possibility to monitor which devices access your site and work accordingly, maybe even trying to buy the device used more frequently to better understand how users really live the site.

In this regard, Enge quotes his recent study on the CNN.com website, where the loading of pages is about 3 seconds on the fastest phones, while for users who have a lower quality smartphone reaches up to 15 seconds.

A confirmation of the differences – even huge ones – that there are in this area and the need to do an optimal job for all users, using the various tools that Google provides and especially based on real world data, real user metrics. Splitt cites, in particular, Page Speed Insights (which allows you to test the site from different locations and network connection, so as to have a better understanding of the loading experience) or Chrome User Experience Report, which, he said, are not so known and widespread.

AMP is not a ranking factor

It is almost inevitable, speaking of false myths related to the speed of the pages, that the speech then falls on the AMP pages, which have often been indicated with a potential ranking factor despite the denials of Google: Splitt reiterates that the algorithm does not use the presence of AMP as a ranking signal, focusing more generally on the importance of speed for the rankings.

AMP is a “fantastic toolkit” that helps a site to serve fast pages to users, but it is the speed of the page that is important for users and Google, because it impacts on conversions, for instance.

And this improves by configuring the CDN well, making sure that caching is done well, optimizing website architecture and making the progressive web app fast by default (convenient because they preload content in the phone cache and can also be used with poor or no network coverage, as Enge recalls), among other things: AMP can help and simplify some processes, but it does not count in itself.

What the speed means to the ranking on Google

Before concluding the episode, Splitt and Enge still dwell on the meaning of “speed as ranking factor” and the Googler – still emphasizing the priority given to content ratings – explains that “If there are two results that are basically good compared to the content, then the ranking will probably reward the one that is faster, which then will have a better position”.

It is good to understand that Google does not rate speed “based on scores, Lighthouse or something like that: more than anything it is as if we grouped the pages by categories – these are programmatically slow, these are OK, these are fast – as you see also speed ratio of the Google Search Console”. So, the people who work on the site have to “figure out if they have really slow pages and how to make them faster, and improve those that are in the middle group, but it doesn’t matter if you have a score of 90 or 95, because that’s not what really makes the difference,” concludes Splitt.