Impact from Page Speed

[brettmandoes]

Hey fellas, thought I'd share this. Had a client that was complaining about lack of visibility in the map pack. I took his site and his top 3 or 4 competitors and created an excel sheet. Broke up the rows into different categories of SEO and started grading each of them on the basis that I didn't have to be the best in the world, just better than his best competitors.

We crushed it in a few areas, but I think his dev had been mucking about the site slowing it down. It was slower than all of his competitors. This is the important part - if he was already the fastest on the block this would not have had the impact I'm about to show you. Also keep in mind that his business is very seasonal, so we were actually expecting business to drop in cooler months, not increase. You can see the improvements in the screenshots I've attached. Kind of surprising to me that it impacted both map views (which had been declining) and his organic search performance. Has anyone else seen that before?

 

[Yan Gilbert]

What are the number improvements on site speed exactly if you don;t mind sharing more details.

 

[brettmandoes]

Sure, it's a little subjective because the tool you use will give different results. This particular client needs something very simple, so I used Page Speed Insights. Mobile results went from 51 to 62 and desktop score went from 75 to 96.

Using the speed index metric in that tool, desktop went from 3.4s to 1.2s and mobile went from 9.5s to 5.4s. I used two plugins, WP Fastest Cache and an image compressor/optimizer (can't remember what it's called at the moment).

Edit: One thing people should probably be aware of if they're mixing and matching plugins to optimize site speed like I was that it sometimes actually slows the site down. You have to test each change to find the right mix. I had one setting that actually slowed me down from the initial benchmark, so I quickly turned that off.

 

[Yan Gilbert]

Yeah, those speed reductions prob made a difference for sure. I aim for less than 2s as a target but I find anything less than 3s does not trigger any penalty. Of course depends on the competition as well.