downtime=zero speed

I wanted to send you a short (well short-ish, it started short but got a bit long) email here re site speed & SEO with some of the insights we’ve learned after optimizing thousands of sites over the last few years – just like I would if we were sitting down over lunch chatting about website stuff and SEO.

Avoiding common mistakes

We get so many inquiries about speeding up websites and 9 times out of 10 what they are really looking for is boosting their SEO and passing Google’s Core Web Vitals test in order to boost their rankings in the search results.

Crazy thing is, while faster sites definitely make a difference in SEO, I don’t see anyone explaining how this actually works.

Usually it gets about as deep as “google said speed is important” or some other throwaway line thats about as useful as someone that barely knows how to use a doorbell, never mind a computer telling you, “oh being on that Google thing is important”.

This often results in people focussing on the wrong thing, like achieving a specific speed score in some random tool because someone who has no business giving advice wrote about in a Facebook Group.

I see it every day in our enquiries inbox that state “we MUST have a 100 score in Google Pagespeed Insights” or something similar. This is the wrong approach and ultimately means that you leave money on the table because your focus is in the wrong place.

There’s 3 ways that site speed impacts SEO

There’s three distinct ways site speed impacts SEO. Uptime of your website and reliability is probably the most important one of the three here and often the most overlooked. People go wrong on this one all the time in site speed land.

Downtime=zero speed

The uptime and reliability of your site and hosting provider REALLY matters. This makes logical sense when you think about it for a minute – downtime is essentially zero speed; therefore, we should probably start our speed optimization process by making sure we have as little downtime as possible. This is mostly why being on a bad cheapy host like Bluehost, Hostgator or Godaddy is a problem.

When I see people talking about site speed improving rankings, it’s most often when they move from a bad host to a good host. They then see their speed improve, see their rankings, organic traffic and conversions improve and determine that speed is clearly better for SEO.

What’s actually happened is they’ve improved their site’s reliability, and Google can now crawl it without getting frequent errors or intermittent downtime.

Most of the cases where there’s a clear organic traffic and rankings improvement after speed optimization work, it’s due to the site’s reliability being improved in some meaningful way, not because the site is faster.

A simple action item….

So based on this insight here’s one simple action we can take to tackle website reliability:

Get uptime monitoring setup for your site.

…and if you’re highly monetized, monitor the top 5-10 pages on your site not just the homepage.

To tackle this problem we’ve built our own uptime monitoring tool that’s simple to use but at the same time intelligent enough to avoid spamming you with false positives.

We’re currently looking for beta testers for the tool and offering access at a discounted rate – if you’re interested in checking it out just hit reply and I’ll send you a link and coupon code.

If you’re looking for help with your site speed, core web vitals or SEO, click here to request a free site audit and we’ll review your site and tell you how we can help.