I feel like the importance of speed is heavily blown out of proportion. Google provides a vanity metric, and optimizers start pushing it to the moon. Audit services start squealing that speed is low, clients hammer the SEO agency claiming that site speed is killing their traffic. And to top it off, speed is now visible right in Google Search Console:
And Google writes in Webmaster Tools: Need to increase speed. LCP value is too high: over 2.5 s (mobile)
The vicious cycle closes.
SEOs start working on things that are unlikely to boost rankings, while ignoring more critical unresolved issues.
People start auditing the Top 10, see high speed, and conclude, «Ah, so it is a ranking factor.» But in reality, sites in that niche might just be better polished overall—keyword-optimized copy, more backlinks pointing to the domain, better internal linking, and so on. It’s just so easy to lump everything together and blame it on speed!
Let’s look at major sites:
womenshealthmag.com — speed score 29
oprahmag.com — speed score 42
amazon.com — 74
nymag.com — 12
allure.com — 10
goop.com — 12
marieclaire.com — 38
cosmopolitan.com — 29
glamour.com — 16
goodhousekeeping.com — 43
These sites are at the top and keep gaining traffic. Yet speed-wise, some of them are absolute weaklings.
Now let’s look at my niche:
Competitor 1 — speed score 99 — traffic decline
Competitor 2 — speed score 69 — traffic decline
Competitor 3 — speed score 77 — traffic decline
Competitor 4 — speed score 86 — traffic decline
Competitor 5 — speed score 89 — traffic decline
Competitor 6 — speed score 75 — traffic decline
Competitor 7 — speed score 93 — traffic decline
I could churn out whatever studies or correlations you want and cherry-pick facts to get a standing ovation and tons of reposts.
What I consider important right now is who is behind the website (is it a brand, a major company, or an underground shop of SEOs working out of a basement?) and who wrote the article about vacuum cleaners (James Hollyfield, an expert living with vacuum cleaners in hand who authored 20 books on them when he wasn’t selling those hated vacuum cleaners, or some budget freelancer from a content mill scraped off the bottom of the barrel who can barely make ends meet).
What should you do?
Here is my guide on speeding up your site in English.
Do it once and forget about it. That way, when you hand your site over to an SEO specialist for an audit, they won’t blame low speed for ranking drops and will focus on things that actually matter during the evaluation.
Oh, and send this post to anyone claiming a site is doomed without high speed.