Today isn’t so much a tip as something to think about in terms of where you are devoting your time and resources.
This is probably an unpopular opinion that will probably go over like a lead balloon but here goes.
I think SEOs are full of crap when it comes to pagespeed and conversion rates.
I noticed something recently. I’m in a lot of groups and forums around the web dedicated strictly to conversion rate optimization. That’s all they talk about.
You know what never gets mentioned when someone asks for help in improving their conversion rates? Pagespeed.
I do not mean rarely. I mean pretty much never. All these industry experts on conversion rates almost never bring up pagespeed. And when they do, they usually just say something like, “Keep your pages loading in under 4 seconds…”
They never quote that, “For every .5 seconds you decrease your pagespeed you will see an increase in conversions by XXX%,” nonsense you see mentioned all over SEO groups and forums.
I thought maybe it was just my own confirmation bias, so I just did a search for tips for improving conversion rates. Took a look at the top 10 results.
Only 3 of them mentioned page speed.
One was Kinsta, which I hardly see as a expert on the topic. Kinsta is also probably hugely biased. They want you to believe pagespeed is vital to everything and that they offer fast hosting.
One was Hubspot, which listed it as 14th among 19 tips.
The other was VMO which is a service for A/B testing, so conversion rates are kind of in their wheelhouse. They listed it 10th out of 11 tips.
Hardly a ringing endorsement for the importance of pagespeed in conversion rates.
To me it seems it is only SEOs that believe it is so vital, and I think that is largely because they are looking to cling to anything to justify all the hours many of them are billing to clients to speed up pages. They certainly aren’t seeing any benefit in the SERPs.
I’m not saying it is bad to decrease load times on your site. It certainly is not going to have a negative impact on your conversions. I just think its impact on conversion rates is grossly exaggerated.
Also, before someone says it, I’m not talking about extreme examples. Yes, if your pages are currently loading in 20 seconds and you decrease that to 3 seconds or less, you will see a dramatic difference in all user metrics. I’m not debating that at all.
I’m more talking about the cases of those desperately trying to trim off an extra 0.2 seconds off of pages or push that PSI score from a 93 to a 99 or 100.
