For years Google and other search engines pushed the idea of the importance of loading speed of your website. All hosting providers have been making their marketing campaigns around this idea. Businesses were spending tons of money and a lot of time on that. Page speed was a nightmare for many SEO professionals.
The nightmare is the right word. Customers were bombarded by all those endless posts, recomendations and statistics explaining that page speed is in the core of their website success. With few clicks they’ve been testing their website on Google Page Speed Test and received many red alerts. Then customers pushed their SEO guys to improve it. After 3-6 months of work the speed gets better but analytics don’t show the expected growth of visitors. Everyone gets frustrated.
Well, finally, couple of days ago Gary Illyes from Google said on Twitter that “ranking wise it’s a teeny tiny factor.” (meaning the page speed)
Thanks a lot Google! Many SEOs knew this for a while. They simly saw it in statistics of their many customers but there were no chance to prove to the customers that all those posts about page speed importance are not quite true.
My solution in the past was that I asked my cusomers to make a list of the websites of their competitors who rank better and test them by Google Page Speed Test.
Once they saw that their competitors’ results were worse we removed the page speed from high priority in our list.
