If you start reading materials on search engine optimization, you’ll find that in every single one of them the authors are foaming at the mouth to convince you that website speed is very important for SEO. At the same time, such articles often lead to services that are ready to deprive you of extra money in a short time, while promising to increase the site loading speed by several percent. Some even keep this promise. And with every next percentage point increase in website speed, the cost of such services increases exponentially.
But if you take a break from SEO marketing and think for a second about the question: why do people visit this or that site?
Yes, simply because they need it for some reason!
Let’s conduct a thought experiment. For example, we have a website that has only one button: GET 1000 USD TO A BANK CARD AS A GIFT ONCE. And let’s assume that this is not phishing or any other type of fraud, and that the person who clicks on this button will really get the desired result. And let’s also assume that this site is not optimized for mobile devices, the page of this site loads half an hour after the third time for the fifth time, the font and font contrast are terrible, and the text of the button is written in some dead language of some South American tribe that has been extinct for 100 years. And the value of such a text in terms of cognitive value tends to absolute zero, which is much less than 2000 characters without spaces.
And now let’s imagine that someone shares a link to such a site with someone else after they have achieved the desired result.
Question: what kind of traffic will such a site have in a week, for example?
Now let’s test our assumptions on some of the most famous websites in the world: Facebook and Youtube. We will be interested in the results for mobile versions of the site, as they are the most critical in terms of speed. Again, mobile optimization… How can you do without it?
Facebook page loading speed
So, we have the measurement results. Well, it’s not bad. But it is still much lower than the loading speed of a single-page website, such as one of my landing pages andrewlazarev.kh.ua. And in addition to the not-so-high loading speed, it also has other SEO optimization that is lame and the readability of the site is so-so from the point of view of Google Lighthouse.
Now let’s test His Majesty Youtube:
Youtube page load speed
Yadren-baton! What?!! Only 34 parrots?!! Somehow? The Great Google tells us that the speed should be there, that it should be there! And here… Google, why?
And yet these sites occupy one of the leading positions in the world:
The most visited sites as of December 2022 according to Similarweb
If the main players in the web surfing market with a market value of a trillion USD each do not bother with the loading speed of their sites, then is it worth it for you with your budgets and audience to try so hard, squeezing another parrot out of Lighthouse or another GTMetrix?
Or maybe you should think about how your site differs from tons of information garbage, where, for example, when you ask to find the official website of an iPhone manufacturer, the first results will show five rewrites of rewrites on the topic “how I spent time on the toilet with an apple bitten”?
Have you decided to play this game with the carrot and the donkey, where the carrot is the website loading speed? Then let’s move on…