As the mobile web has grown over the years, one of the technical elements of digital marketing
that has gotten more important is website performance, specifically Page Speed.
Google started talking about the importance of page speed about five or six years ago,
and they’ve even gone as far as officially claiming that it’s a ranking factor.
Google’s also built lots of tools for Page Speed, including tracking in Google Search
Console so you can see how your website stacks up overall.
With all of the data Google is providing, including a nice round number from 0-100 using
their page speed insights tool, page speed optimization should be easy to measure and
quantify.
However, in practice that is often not the case.
We’ll talk in this video about some of the pros and cons of page speed optimization and
how it fits in with other marketing efforts.
Simply put, optimizing for page speed means making the pages on your website load as fast
as possible.
It’s especially important on mobile devices where connections are traditionally a little
bit slower than a desktop device.
There are lots of ways to improve page speed - improving server performance, improving
how assets are loaded, reducing the number of assets that you need to load, optimizing
and compressing images.
All of these things are good in a vacuum, and improving page speed is helpful for users.
However, here are two important considerations to think through when you are focused on improving
your page speed.
First, Page Speed scores are relative and subjective depending on your industry and
content
You’ll see lots of websites boasting page speed scores of 99 or 100.
Kudos to them!
But the simple fact is that depending on the nature of your website and your industry,
it might not be feasible or necessary to hit a perfect score.
Some websites rely heavily on videos or imagery, whether part of their brand or industry focus.
And things like high resolution videos are important to their overall marketing and branding
strategy.
These companies are choosing brand experience over speed, which is completely acceptable.
Other web pages might need a ton of interactive content to help solve problems for users - maybe
a tutorial or step by step process.
Those are going to be heavier loading times by nature.
Shaving off a half second of loading time can be a huge money maker for a large ecommerce
site like Amazon.
But if you’re giving people tips on flushing out a hot water heater, or you’re a university
that provides information about your degree programs to prospective students, shaving
off half a second from your loading time isn’t critical to your business success.
Yes, your page speed scores matter, but a slight increase or decrease isn’t going
to drastically impact your bottom line.
Now, onto my second consideration: Page Speed scores are often at odds with other marketing
efforts
One of the biggest culprits of poor page speed scores are websites with lots of javascript,
often in the form of things like chat modules, social media integrations, CRM or CDP tracking.
You want to be cautious with how you load those things, but none of them are bad to
have on your site.
In fact, they are often mission critical for marketers.
A lot of Page Speed tools will recommend you remove javascript or load it in a way that
may impact the ability of your integrations to function.
Is it worth removing your chat or remarketing tag from your site to improve your page speed
score by five or ten points?
Most of the time, no.
Again, it’s important to look at these things and make sure they’re working efficiently,
but even Google’s own analytics code will increase loading time on a site.
You need to keep balance in mind when auditing and reviewing your page speed scores.
To wrap up, page speed optimization should one hundred percent be part of your digital
strategy as you look to improve your website.
But if you over-optimize around page speed, you may end up negatively impacting your bottom
line.
There are a lot of factors to weigh when you are looking at improving page speed, so be
sure to think through them and not get too focused on that nice round number from 0-100
that Google’s tools spit out for you.
Be sure to work with an exp ert that will walk through the pros and cons of different
approaches.
For more information on how to improve your website, check out our YouTube channel.
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