Why Web Page Speed Matters Most?

There is nothing that affects website visibility more than Page Speed!

Bigger Sites Rank Better!

A larger site will out rank a smaller site because with a larger site your able to control the flow of your internal link juice and you’ve got more pages to receive external links.

Higher Domain Authority: Large sites with more pages ranking in search engines tend to generate more links and achieve higher domain authority. Improved Link-Building: As noted, when you have more page links to share and distribute, you have greater potential to earn a diverse mix of high-quality links.

Google has a Crawl Budget

Google doesn't have unlimited resources to spend crawling websites.

Crawl Budget

Which is the number of pages Googlebot will crawl within a given time frame. If a page takes more than a second for the first content paint it can lead to a lower crawl budget, meaning fewer pages from your site get indexed.

Google doesn't have unlimited resources to spend crawling websites. That's why there are crawl budgets in the first place. Basically, it's a way for Google to prioritize which pages to crawl most often. If Google's resources are limited for one reason or another, this can affect your website's crawl capacity limit.

Google has a Crawl Rate

Crawl rate is the number of requests a search engine crawler makes to a website in a day.

Crawl Rate

Crawl rate is the number of requests a search engine crawler makes to a website in a day and was introduced to reduce server overload.

If your site takes longer than a second for the first content paint, Googlebot will reduce its crawl rate to avoid overloading your server, leading to less frequent updates and potentially missing new or updated content.

Google has a Crawl Depth

Crawl depth influences how efficiently Google can index your content.

Crawl Depth

If your site takes longer than a second for the first content paint the site may not have their deeper pages crawled and indexed, affecting the visibility of those pages in search results.

Crawl depth influences how efficiently Google can index your content. Googlebot has limited time and server resources. Therefore, the crawl budget, or the number of pages Googlebot can crawl on your site during a specific time frame, is finite. Crawl depth also impacts user experience!

Google has a Crawl Timeout

Your site should not take longer than a second for the first content paint!

Crawl Timeout

Googlebot has a limited amount of time to crawl each page. So if your site takes longer than a second for the first content paint, Googlebot may abandon the crawl, leaving your pages unindexed.

Your crawl budget refers to the number of pages Googlebot can crawl on your site within a certain timeframe. If a page is close to or exceeds the 15MB limit, Googlebot may use up more of your allocated crawl budget to download and process that page. This leaves fewer resources for crawling other pages on your site.

Core Web Vitals

In May 2021, Google introduced Core Web Vitals

LCP

One of the key components of Core Web Vitals is Largest Content Paint (LCP). Google considers an LCP of over 2.5 seconds as needing improvement. LCP measures the time it takes to render the largest content element visible in the viewport.

In essence, Google is clearly stating that your site should achieve an LCP under 2.5 seconds to avoid performance issues. If your largest content element takes longer than this to load, it indicates a problem that could negatively impact your SEO rankings.

Optimizing for Core Web Vitals, particularly LCP, is crucial for maintaining and improving search visibility.

User Experience and Engagement

Google’s own research indicates that bounce rate increases dramatically as page load time increases.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate almost triples when page load time exceeds three seconds. This means users are more likely to leave your site before it fully loads, negatively impacting user engagement metrics that Google considers in its ranking algorithm.

Google’s own research indicates that bounce rate increases dramatically as page load time increases.

User Experience and Session Duration

Session Duration can impact search engine rankings.

Session Duration

Impact search engine rankings.

Search engines like Google look at user engagement as a signal when ranking websites because they want to send people to websites that provide a great experience. The longer someone stays on and the more pages people click on is an indication to Google people are enjoying their web experience. And studies have shown that 53% of people will leave a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds for the largest content paint.

Direct Impact on Conversions and Revenue

Amazon: Found that for every 100 milliseconds of improved load time, there was a 1% increase in sales.

Web Page Speed Affects Conversions!

  • Amazon: Found that for every 100 milliseconds of improved load time, there was a 1% increase in sales.
  • Mobify: Reported a 1.11% increase in sales for every 100 milliseconds improvement.
  • Walmart: Saw a 2% increase in conversion rate for every one-second improvement in page load time.
  • Cook: Observed a 7% increase in conversions for every 850 milliseconds improvement in load time.

Let’s say you’re spending $1,000 a day on ads and getting 1 sale!

To double your income you could spend $200 or you increase conversions by just 1%.

Increasing page speed by 100 milliseconds!

The average site takes about 23.6 seconds to load on mobile, if you get that down to .8 milliseconds

23.6seconds−0.8seconds=22.8seconds, 22.8seconds×1000milliseconds/second=22,800milliseconds, 100milliseconds divided 22,800milliseconds =228

Therefore, if the website's load time is reduced from 23.6 seconds to 0.8 seconds, they might see a 228% increase in sales based on Amazon's math.