The Impact of Page Speed on SEO and Conversion Rates: Optimisation Tips and Tools

Page speed is one of the most important factors for the growth of scale-up brands in the digital age, and certainly so for SaaS brands. It influences not only your SEO rankings, but also your conversion rates, which means your revenue is impacted too.

In this blog post we look at how page speed seo affects your organic growth and conversions. If you want to connect that technical foundation to content and leads, that fits within our approach as an SEO company.

Work it out yourself: measure your conversion rate and compare it with the B2B benchmark using our free conversion rate calculator.

Understanding the Link: Page Speed, SEO and Conversions

Page speed is the time it takes to load a web page and display its content. It can be measured with various metrics, known as Web Vitals, the most important of which are the Core Web Vitals.

Core Web Vitals

Google defines Core Web Vitals as the subset of Web Vitals that apply to all web pages, should be measured by all site owners, and will be visible across all Google tools. Each of the Core Web Vitals represents a specific aspect of the user experience, is measurable in the field, and reflects the real user experience of a critical outcome.

Each Core Web Vital looks at a different part of how people use a website, and together they show how well a website serves its users in practice.

The four Core Web Vitals are:

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) replaced First Input Delay (FID) in March 2024. INP assesses responsiveness using data from the Event Timing API. If an interaction makes a page unresponsive, that is a poor user experience. INP observes the latency of all the interactions a user has had with the page and reports a single value that holds for all (or nearly all) interactions. A low INP means the page was consistently able to respond quickly to all (or the vast majority) of user interactions.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures loading performance. For a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.

First Input Delay (FID) measures interactivity. For a good user experience, pages should have an FID of 100 milliseconds or less.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability. For a good user experience, pages should have a CLS of 0.1 or less.

These Core Web Vitals are all ranking factors and can help or harm your rankings in the search results, especially on mobile searches.

How Page Speed Affects User Experience (UX)

A faster page speed can not only improve your website’s visibility and organic traffic, but can also improve the user experience by lowering the bounce rate, increasing engagement and building trust. According to Google, 53% of mobile visitors abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Conversion Rates vs. Page Load Time

Page speed also has a link with conversions, whether these are sign-ups, subscriptions, purchases or downloads. A faster page speed can increase your conversions by reducing friction, improving satisfaction and creating urgency.

According to research by Akamai, a delay of 100 milliseconds (or one tenth of a second) in a website’s load time can lower conversion rates by 7%.

When we look at real examples of brands benefiting from page speed optimisation, we see just how big these improvements can be.

How fast is your site? Check your load time and Core Web Vitals with our free website speed test.

Examples of Brands Benefiting from Page Speed Optimisation

Pinterest

In 2015, Pinterest improved the performance of their mobile website, increased page speed by 60% and raised sign-up conversion by 40%.

• They rebuilt the entire site, using metrics such as user perceived wait time (UPWT).
• Optimisations covered the front end, the network and the back end.
• They reduced data loading for faster page rendering, adopted React for efficiency, improved their CDN and streamlined data fetching.
• These changes cut user wait times by 40%, increased search engine traffic by 15% and raised sign-up conversion by 15%.
• In 2016, this became Pinterest’s biggest user acquisition success.

Netflix

Netflix reduced page load time by 50% for their logged-out home page by minimising JavaScript usage and switching to vanilla JavaScript.

• This change also reduced the JavaScript bundle size by more than 200kB.
• Netflix improved time-to-interactive by 30% through prefetching techniques for HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
• By handling JavaScript carefully and optimising resource loading, they improved the sign-up process, which led to a better user experience and higher sign-up rates.

These improvements demonstrate the importance of performance in website design, which ensures faster loading and smoother interactions for users.

Vodafone

Vodafone found that optimising for Web Vitals led to 8% more sales.

• They ran an A/B test on a landing page (where version A was optimised for Web Vitals and had a 31% better LCP score in the field than version B), and studies have also shown the negative impact of poor performance on business goals.
• For example, the BBC found that they lost an additional 10% of users for every extra second their site took to load. Studies like these show that performance is not just the domain of engineers, but that it is directly connected to business outcomes.

Best Practices and Tools for Page Speed Optimisation

There are many tools and best practices available to improve your website’s performance and optimise page speed. Some of the most important ones are:

• Google PageSpeed Insights: provides instant feedback on how your website performs and gives suggestions for improvement.
• Lighthouse: an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages.
• WebPagetest: measures the performance of a page from multiple locations around the world using real browsers.
• Web.dev: a website from Google that helps you learn and apply modern web technologies.

It is important to monitor and optimise your website continuously in order to offer the best possible user experience and to benefit from better SEO rankings and higher conversion rates.

Conclusion

Page speed is a crucial factor for SEO and conversions in the digital age. By optimising your website’s performance, you can offer a better user experience, improve your SEO ranking and increase your revenue. It is time to analyse your website and take the necessary steps to make sure it runs as fast and as efficiently as possible.