Does Page Speed Matter?

Page speed is an important consideration when designing your website. It can affect your user experience, your conversion rate, and possibly even SEO.

In this article, we'll cover the following topics regarding page speed:

• What is page speed?
• How important is page speed to my conversion rate?
• How important is page speed to my SEO?

What Is Page Speed?

Page speed is, simply put, the speed at which your web pages load. These days most websites tend to load in just a few seconds, even if they're advanced. But even just a few seconds can have a proven effect on your website's success.

What Is PageSpeed Insights?

An industry-standard tool for measuring your page's speed is Google's PageSpeed Insights. Announced in 2010 as part of Google's initiative to add page speed to their ranking factors, it's a rather robust tool for determining how quickly your web pages load & what you can fix to make them load faster.

PageSpeed Insights score your page in four categories. In each category, you get a score between 0 and 100. The categories are:

• Performance, or how quickly your page loads
• Accessibility, or how easy your website is to use for people with disabilities
• Best Practices, or whether your website is following a set of best practices for the web
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The Performance score will give you detailed feedback on how you can improve your web page to optimize load times; so, a high score will typically result in a fast-loading website. The other three scores are much simpler, giving only basic guidance.

If you have a score lower than 100% in any category, it will identify the issues & give you hints for how to fix them.

What Performance Score Should I Have?

It's hard to say what performance score every website should have, as all websites are different.

If you want a great score, you should aim for 90% or higher. This should be reasonable for most brochure websites, with some hard work.

Keep in mind that the tool is rather strict — for mobile page speeds, it's using a highly-throttled connection of under 2mb/s. Most users will have significantly faster connections, in reality.

What About The Other PageSpeed Scores?

Generally speaking, you should aim for 100% in all of the other scores.

While the Performance score can be tricky to master, the other three are measuring basic standards. For instance, a 100% score in SEO does not mean you will shoot to the top of the rankings; it merely means that your website has satisfied a simple checklist for search engine visibility, which is a good start, but only the beginning of a complete SEO plan.

Furthermore, the Accessibility score only measures a few very simple criteria. A 100% score in Accessibility does NOT mean your website is compliant with accessibility standards, or relevant laws. There are other accessibility scanning tools that can give you more in-depth feedback, and even those are no replacement for manual testing by an accessibility expert.

How Important Is Page Speed?

Your page speed can have a huge effect on things that matter most with your website, like conversion rate. It may even have some effect on search engine rankings.

How Does Page Speed Affect Conversion?

Research has routinely found that slower pages are less likely to convert.

A study by Google found that each second of delay in your website's loading time could cause conversions to fall by 20%. Another report found that 53% of mobile visits are abandoned if the site takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Amazon found that each one-tenth of a second in delay cost them 1% in sales.

Generally, users will be much happier if your website loads quickly.

How Does Page Speed Affect SEO?

Page speed's effect on SEO isn't as clear-cut.

Google announced in 2010 that page speed was now a ranking factor:

Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed—that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.

However, they go on to say that other factors, like relevance, are still most important. Matt Cutts says in a YouTube video by Google Search Central from 2010 that page speed only comes into account when everything else is the same, from relevance to backlinks.

In a more recent video by Google, Martin Splitt says that page speed won't directly affect your site's performance in Google Search.

Another important thing to understand is that Google doesn't actually use the PageSpeed scores as a ranking factor. They now use Core Web Vitals (CWV) in its place. In an SEO office-hours video from 2022, Google Search Advocate John Mueller reconfirmed that CWV is a ranking factor, but that they consider relevance above all. CWV is a ranking factor only in that they focus on the difference between something that is reasonably okay and something that is very slow.

What Are The Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals metrics are based on Google's data about real-world user experiences on your website. This data comes from the Chrome User Experience Report (or, CrUX). According to the CrUX methodology, they use CWV data for websites that have a high enough sample size of CrUX data.

Core Web Vitals considers the following metrics:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures how long it takes to load the largest visible object on your page
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP), or the longest delay in response for an interaction on your page
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), measuring how much your page's layout shifts abruptly & unexpectedly

It's important to notice that speed is not directly a factor. Loading speed can certainly have an impact here, but they are more focused on how these elements of the user experience are affected.

Conclusion

So, it turns out that page speed can be pretty important! From having a direct impact on conversion rate, as shown in various studies, to even having a small effect on SEO ranking factors, focusing on improving a slow website could bring you real returns.

If you want a website that loads quickly, Acworth Web Designs specializes in custom, static websites that won't leave your customers waiting. Contact us today to for a free consultation on your new website.