🔎 Focus: Core Web Vitals
🔴 Impact: High (Content Invisibility)
🔴 Difficulty: High
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Dear Tech SEO 👋
Today I am checking how important is site speed for revenue and not necessarily “good for SEO”..
Is Site Speed Good “For SEO“?
I’ve read some big figures in the SEO industry referring to site performance (speed to make it simple) with something like:
Site performance (Core Web Vitals) matters but not for SEO...
What is site speed “for SEO“? To rank? To get traffic?
SEO is a PROFIT channel. Ultimately, it has to generate money. If the site is fast by definition it tends to return more revenue…
Here an example bechmark:
Impact of LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) on Conversion Rates (source: web.dev)
The LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) impacts directly on conversion rate.
💁♂ LCP: time it takes for the biggest piece of the page to be rendered on your browser.
Just that LCP won’t get you directly one bit of better rankings, clicks or impressions. Working on it seems a bit counterintuitive if you only look at rankings.
But let me explain how it actually works:
You build a relatively slow page
You rank that page, other ranking factors might favor you
User lands on a slow page
User clicks on another page, also slow
User clicks on another page, also slow
…
User leaves because your site overall is slow
I have been able to rank high with “slow“ websites getting a lot of traffic. The problem is the conversion rates were very low because. Despite having traffic it did not generate enough revenue.
Can you rank slow websites? Yes.
Does that mean you won SEO? No.
SEO is traffic > user experience > profit.
Let’s check some case studies of how revenue grows by working on site speed.
Swappie increased mobile revenue by 42% by focusing on Core Web Vitals
Swappie grew revenue by working on the Core Web Vitals
(Source: https://web.dev/case-studies/swappie)
What was the problem?
Mobile conversion rates, were low (less than half what it should be):
24% relative to the Desktop conversion rates.
Average in their industry is 50%.
What did they do?
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): Reduced by 55% by rendering LCP elements on the server instead of the client.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): Reduced by 91% by testing various viewports and languages to fix shifting elements.
FID (First Input Delay): Reduced by 90%.
Media & Assets: Preloading for LCP images, lazy loading for off-screen content, and switched font providers to handle multi-language typefaces more efficiently.
Code Hygiene: Audited third-party scripts, removing unnecessary ones and optimizing others. They also focused on code-splitting, better bundling, and removing unused CSS/JS. (🤷♂ This is my favorite thing to do btw).
Results of working on CWV
Metric | Improvement |
Mobile Revenue | +42% |
Rel mCvR | +10 percentage points (24% to 34%) |
Page Load Time | -23% |
The Core Web Vitals Anti-Hero
Google recently reduced the maximum size allowed for indexing. I was checking how long would it take me to find websites with an HTML file over 2MB. It did not take me much.
In short:
And indeed this homepage was gigantic: 18k+ HTML lines
Large HTML files can easily go above 2MB
Surprise, surprise... The performance of the same website is dying softly…
Bad performing website dues to Tech SEO issues
So this business is not only losing rankings and traffic but also revenue per user.
Why Core Web Vitals Is Dying Trend
Here a good take on the SEO industry sentiment:
I share this post of Charles because I agree. It is a dying trend and it should NOT be.
Core Web Vitals and general Technical SEO has become more important than ever
Site speed impacts revenue
Good and fast usability makes visitors happy
But working on Tech SEO and Core Web Vitals is usually the lowest priority of most businesses. I am still trying to understand why but have not figured it out yet. Maybe has to do with the fact is a bit boring? You tell me :)
Here my 2 cents to push make Tech SEO less boring:
The 4 Layers of Tech SEO
Reply to this email with “Core Web Vitals is my jam“ if you changed your mind a bit about site speed and SEO 🙂
Note: if you reply to this email it also helps emails systems to understand I’m legit and not spam.
Recommended Reads
Until next time 👋
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