Site Speed. I've seen many clients get obsessed with the idea of slow site speed. Clients have spent an inordinate amount of time watching the Core Web Vitals and deploying engineers to fix this problem.
I get it. Those Core Web Vital graphs are scary especially when most of your URLS are red and the ones that aren't are green. But i'm here to tell you that if site speed is keeping you up at night you're focusing on the wrong thing.
Let's start by clearing up the confusion. When CWV has first announced Google came out with this language:
“Relevance is still by far much more important. So just because your website is faster with regards to Core Web Vitals than some competitors doesn’t necessarily mean that come May, you will jump to position number one in the search results.”
What does this mean? Depends on your interpretation. Most SEO conversations insisted this meant that page speed was just a tie breaker. This became the narrative until John Mueller corrected this month's later:
“It is a ranking factor, and it’s more than a tie-breaker, but it also doesn’t replace relevance.
Depending on the sites you work on, you might notice it more, or you might notice it less.
As an SEO, a part of your role is to take all of the possible optimizations and figure out which ones are worth spending time on.
Any SEO tool will spit out 10s or 100s of “recommendations”, most of those are going to be irrelevant to your site’s visibility in search.
Finding the items that make sense to work on takes experience.”
Um, okay. So it's more than a tie-breaker, but certainly feels like...a tiebreaker.
So what does this mean? If you're up at night worried about ripping scripts off your page and closing down programmatic ads, you might be focused on the wrong things.
Your website and its relevance to the searches and conversations online that you want to be a part of matter most. So if your content stinks, if your pages do a poor job of communicating to Google what they are and why they matter then no amount of fast loaded pages will fix that.
Google's job, at its best, is to direct users to the most relevant places for the query they are searching. You need to spend your time making sure Google can read your pages and be assured over and over that your page is THE destination for that query.
Of course making your pages faster and having a better ad experience matter but only as a secondary factor once you've mastered the art of relevance on your site.
Don’t get fooled into thinking that you need to spend endless amounts of time and engineering on fixing a problem that, in my experience, EVERYONE HAS. Focus on content first and foremost and everything else will fall into place.
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