And I will challenge any SEO or website developer to debate me on this and show me where I’m wrong.
This is all being done on mobile because Google ranks pages according to how well they work on mobile devices and we are using Google’s own lighthouse tool for studying this.
For example lets take AA Criminal Law’s website. The website takes 3.7 seconds for the first content paint. According to Google if the first content paint isn’t in under a second Google will limit how deep, how often, and how long they spider the site.
Now lets keep in mind that 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.
Unless the site takes more than a second for the first content paint, like with AA Criminal that takes a whopping 3.7 seconds.
1. Because Google has a...
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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.
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Crawl Rate: 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.
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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.
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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.
This site takes 23.6 seconds for the largest content paint, if the largest content paint isn’t in under 2.5 seconds it will get a Google ranking penalty.
For example Google has...
2. Core Web Vitals
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In May 2021, Google introduced Core Web Vitals, emphasizing the importance of user experience metrics in their ranking algorithm.
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During a Google Webmaster Hangout, John Mueller explained that Google aims to provide the best possible user experience. As part of this strategy, they have begun to reward sites that optimize content delivery for speed.
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By 2022, John Mueller reaffirmed that page speed remains a critical factor in SEO. However, the focus has shifted from page speed as a standalone metric to the more comprehensive Core Web Vitals, which uses various elements to measure user experience.
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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.
Thus, optimizing for Core Web Vitals, particularly LCP, is crucial for maintaining and improving search visibility.
So page speed affects crawlability and rankings but it affects User Experience and Engagement Metrics.
3. User Experience and Engagement Metrics
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Bounce Rate: Google’s own research indicates that bounce rate increases dramatically as page load time increases. Specifically, 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.
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Session Duration: Can 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.
Now while page speed affects the single most important thing which is Google being able to find the page, as well Core Web Vitals, and the users experience and engagement it also affects conversions and revenue.
4. Direct Impact on Conversions and Revenue
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Amazon: Found that for every 100 milliseconds of improved load time, there was a 1% increase in sales.
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Mobify: Reported a 1.11% increase in sales for every 100 milliseconds improvement.
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Walmart: Saw a 2% increase in conversion rate for every one-second improvement in page load time.
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Cook: Observed a 7% increase in conversions for every 850 milliseconds improvement in load time.
So let’s say an attorney is spending $1,000 a day on a PPC campaign and getting 1 sale!
Now for the sake of argument lets say if the attorney spends $2,000 they get two sells or they could increase page speed by just 100 milliseconds and get the extra sell that way.
Or I can show you how to get load times down to .8 milliseconds and using Amazon’s example we could do the math on that.
Determine the improvement in load time:
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Initial load time: 23.6 seconds
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Improved load time: 0.8 seconds
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Improvement: 23.6seconds−0.8seconds=22.8seconds
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Convert the improvement to milliseconds:
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Calculate the percentage increase in sales based on the improvement:
This means that an improvement of 22,800 milliseconds (or 22.8 seconds) would correspond to a:
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228×1%=228% increase in sales.
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.
And that is in addition to the increase in rankings, page speed from being able to index more pages, and the increase in sales from better optimizing the hero section we talked about in the other video.