At the recent SMX East conference in New York, I sat in on a session presented by Fili Wiese, titled, “The Need for Speed.” Wiese is a former member of Google’s search quality team who also worked as a clickspam engineer.
In this session, he presented a lot of great technical data, as well as information on ways to improve site performance.
One of the articles Wiese referenced was “Page Load Times vs. Conversion Rates,” and the data contained in that article is truly compelling:
If that isn’t motivation enough, Google has said that they plan to make page speed a direct ranking factor on mobile devices. You may ask how big a factor it might become, but I do think that speed matters a lot to mobile users, so there is reason to believe that this is a ranking factor that will have some weight to it.
Bigger than content quality and links? Don’t be silly. But still, it’s a signal that could have some impact.
The great majority of sites have many potential opportunities to dramatically speed things up.
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