One of the first blog posts I wrote for MYCO was about a client who had called to say his hosts had sent him a “warning” saying that his site had a speed score of only 14%, and he should buy their speed-up service to make it faster.
On closer inspection it turned out that the “speed score” was essentially based on one single factor – whether or not you had bought their speed-up service – and had nothing to do with any objective measure of speed.
Website speed seems to be a smaller concern now than it was 4-5 years ago. This could be in part to Google admitting that speed is no longer a ranking factor, but also down to the fact that web technologies have improved and internet speeds have increased, making websites natively faster. So does it still matter?
The answer is that it depends. Whilst not having a direct link on SEO, speed does have an effect on conversion. There is a famous statistic from Amazon that they discovered loading a page just 0.1 seconds faster increased sales by 1%, or about $3.8billion at their current turnover. Well worth paying a few bob to get that page speed up then.
Does that hold true for the average clinic? Probably not, although there will be some correlation. We have come across clinic websites on awful hosting that take 20 seconds to load, and there obviously you will without a doubt lose patients, but generally it’s hard to imagine that a small clinic website which has no noticeable delay in loading would benefit from any great investment into getting it faster.
And these days, that’s the yardstick we use. If the website doesn’t feel slow on a pretty standard internet connection, we don’t worry about speed. That’s not to say that it couldn’t get faster and there wouldn’t be some benefit in that, just that from an SEO and CRO point of view there is pretty much always something more useful we could be doing – building content, links, citations, outreach, etc., etc.
There is one other consideration which is the size of your page, known as the payload, for people using limited mobile data. To keep their bills down, there is no sense using gigabyte-sized images when a smaller and web-optimised version will do. However, as mobile data has got cheaper and cheaper (I pay £20 a month for unlimited calls, texts and data), even this is less of a concern.
If you want to get an objective measure of your website’s speed, you can use Google PageSpeed Insights – I wrote on our other website about how we scored 97% in this test.
But for my money these days if it feels fast enough when you’re using it, then your resources could be better used elsewhere.
