Does PageSpeed Actually Impact SEO? [New Experiment]

Key Takeaways

to site speed actually affect your Google rankings while they recently decided to put this ranking factor to the test and the results might surprise you i'm brian dean the founder of backlinko the place where marketers turn for higher rankings and more traffic and in this video i'm going to show you the results of my SEO experiment keep watching you've probably heard that PageSpeed is an important google ranking factor there are a million blog post out there that tell you how important page speed is for SEO plus a few years ago Google rolled out a page speed update that specifically down ranked sites that loaded slowly on mobile devices I mean even a large scale analysis of 1 million google search results that we did found a correlation between loading speed and first page rankings in google but I haven't seen an experiment that isolated page speed as a potential ranking factor which is why I decided to run one here's what happened a while back I noticed that a lot of our pages even those that ranked number one for competitive keywords had horrible page speed scores for example this page that ranks in the top 3 of Google for SEO checklist scores an 18 out of 100 in Google PageSpeed insights now I was pretty sure that Google use loading speed as a ranking factor but seeing all those slow pages that were ranking for competitive keywords made me wonder its page speed one of those minor factors that don't really make a big difference or is it something that will make or break your rankings to find out I wanted to improve the speed of a single page and then measure how that pages rankings and organic traffic changed over time I ultimately decided to run the experiment on this page a list post of SEO tips now this seemed like the perfect page to test because it was already ranking at the bottom of the first page for my target keyword SEO tips and if that page moved up to the top of the page that would be a strong sign that whatever I did made a big difference so before the experiment began this page ranked number 8 for SEO tips and was bringing in about a hundred and 50 organic visitors per week these numbers had been stable over the last few months and when I ran the page on Google PageSpeed insights and had a score of 28 on desktop and 13 on mobile which are absolutely horrible scores all around that pages score on webpagetest.org wasn't any better according to that test my page took 40 seconds to load 40 seconds so those were my benchmark numbers next it was time to actually improve the loading speed of that page so backlinko CTO and I decided to dig in and figure out why this page was loading so slowly on the surface this page really shouldn't be slow in the first place we use an optimized lightweight WordPress theme compress all of our images and we use a CDN as it turned out this page loaded slowly mostly because it had lots and lots of high-res images in fact that pages total file size was 25 megabytes that's bigger than the sizes of contra 3 starfox Super Metroid and Donkey Kong Country can bind now a study that we recently did that analyzed 5 million web pages found that large pages load a lot slower than small pages no surprise there and no matter what else you do to optimize it for speed a big page is just gonna be slow period so when it comes to page speed there's no such thing as a free lunch so the first thing we did was strip out all of those massive images that helped but it didn't really make enough of a difference for this experiment to hold water we need it to go extreme in other words to measure the effect of page speed on SEO we needed to take a page that was running super slowly and make it load lightning-fast and to do that our CTO lloyd created a version of our page that was stripped down to the bare basics specifically here all the changes that Lloyd made to that page to speed things up that's right he even went as far as to remove the reply feature from comments because that slowed things down by a millisecond or two and here's how the new faster version of that page looked now at this point I should point something out even after all those massive changes to the site's code the actual content was a hundred percent the same the title tag h2 keywords and all that stuff was exactly the same as the old post the only real difference was that the page loaded much faster in fact our Google page speed score went from 28 to a hundred out of a hundred on desktop a huge difference and according to web page test the page now loaded in 1.6 eight seconds of 40 times improvement compared to the old post so once the new page was live we use the Google search console to index the page and waited I waited two weeks to give Google enough time to get used to the newer faster version of the page and for them to measure any sort of user experience signals that might be different now that the page loads quickly after two weeks the ranking for that page for my target keyword was exactly the same number eight also organic traffic to that page was largely unchanged the slow page brought in 305 organic visitors in the two-week period before the experiment and the faster page brought in 311 visitors from Google for the two weeks that it was live essentially the same amount of traffic what I found super interesting was that the bounce rate was actually 40 8.84% worse on the fast page this might be because users get their answer quickly then bounce however average session duration and pageviews were both higher on the faster page which shows that overall people tended to interact with my site longer when they landed on a faster page makes sense in fact improving page loading speed made so little difference for SEO that we decided to roll back to the old slow version of the page so what are the takeaway lessons here it's hard to draw any sort of firm conclusions based on a single experiment on a single page plus my target keyword SEO tips is pretty competitive so it could be that the SEO boost that we got from a faster page just wasn't enough to increase the rankings for that competitive term there are lots of huge Authority sites ranking above me for that keyword so optimizing for just a single ranking factor might not be enough to shoot it to the top of the results so yeah things might have been different if we ran this experiment on a page that was ranking for a low competition keyword that said if page speed really was a super important ranking factor I would have expected to see some movement especially considering the dramatic change in page speed scores so yeah this data suggests that page speed might not be some sort of SEO magic bullet and at least according to this one small experiment improving a pages loading speed may not actually impact your Google rankings at least when it comes to competitive keywords so did you learn something new from this video then make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel right now also if you want exclusive SEO techniques that I only share with subscribers head over to Becca lucam and hop on the newsletter it's free now I want to turn it over to you have you seen page speed impact your Google rankings if so did it make a big difference or a little difference let me know by leaving a comment below right now this is a shot of me waiting so we can just wait a second okay I think that's good even all that okay that's good for video number two