Google Page Speed

[seoman10]

Is it worthwhile going after a good score on Google page speed?

Had prices but a LOT of money, and don't know if it's worth it or not.

Also to add to the complication it is a new site.

Does anyone have any experience if it helps rankings?

Thanks

[MattAntonino]

Yes, pagespeed is a confirmed Google ranking factor. You should try to optimise as much as possible. Depending on what's currently wrong this can be anywhere from a half hour job to a full site rebuild. If you had multiple high quotes, it's probably leaning toward the latter. Happy to take a look if you leave a domain here or drop me a PM. But yes, site speed does matter. The more difficult & competitive the keywords, the more it matters.

[DirkC]

It surprises me that it would cost a lot of money. It can be costly if you want to get 100% score - but most of the time things like optimising your images, gzip & minify your content, caching ... shouldn't cost a fortune.

Don't forget to also check tools like Webpagetest.org - which are checking the actual load time.

These are complimentary to Page speed insights. As an example: if you serve a 5 1000KB images that are compressed and optimized Google Page Speed insights will be quite happy - however - on Webpagetest.org you will see the impact of these heavy images on load time.

As Matt is saying - speed is important - and will probably become more important in the future (increasing number of visits on mobile devices with slower network connections)

Dirk

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[seoman10]

Could you elaborate what you mean by 'every other SEO issue'

Thanks

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[seoman10]

I would like to point out I am not green to SEO, but explicit answers do help

The site is brand-new and built-in WordPress, I'm not aware of any major issues impacting.

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[RuthBurrReedy]

So, I don't totally agree with the statement "it's not worth it, UNLESS you have fixed every other SEO issue," although I totally see where Josh is coming from. From a purely "how well will this affect how my site ranks in Google" perspective, Josh is right, there are usually a lot of other things that you could be spending time or money on that would have bigger bang for your buck - but there are other reasons to want your site to load quickly (such as that users like it and it makes it easier to access your site using mobile devices).

In my experience/testing, page load time doesn't start to affect your rankings unless your site is really, really, really slow, well over 10 seconds of page load time. So anything under around 15 seconds on average, you're not going to see a negative SEO affect. From there, it's just a matter of making things as fast as you can, for your users, in ways that make sense for you.

Whenever I make recommendations to speed up a site there are always things where I'm like "this is not going to make that much of an impact so if it's going to cost a lot of money to do, you shouldn't do it." What those things are and how much time/money they'll take to fix will be different for everyone. I would say, fix the things that you can fix cheaply and easily (this is usually things like compressing images, inlining resources, and changing cache expiration). Save the stuff that's going to take more time and money and keep it in mind for the next time you want to make other substantial updates to your site.