From the #Duh! department:

In case you are still arguing with your developers about how much time they should be spending fixing site performance issues, I thought I’d pass on the following screenshots:

Crawl Stats SEO

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Site Speed and SEO

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9 Response Comments

  • R.Rogerson  August 24, 2015 at 6:25 am

    Load speeds are important.

    Technically crawl rate shouldn’t make much difference – unless you have a ton of content that is seldom crawled.

    Traffic/Ranking is more important … but generally you will only see improvements;
    a) If your site was darn slow to begin with (shifting from 3 to 2.2 seconds is not going to boost your rankings)
    b) in Mobile search (and I don’t think anyone has found to what degree of impact that has?)

    You are missing an image mind you – Conversions.
    Improving page load times can have positive impact on conversion rates too – sometimes more noticeable than ranking influence.
    Being able to show those in charge that speeding up the site can generate more money is often simpler than convincing them rankings are better.

    The best bit though is … in most cases, it’s a one-shot deal. They only need to invest in the setup once, and job done.
    Better yet, if you know what you are doing, most of the changes can be done in less than an hour (server config, combining/compressing files and altering requests , shifting where JS is called etc.). The hard part is things like sharding domains, moving files and rewriting the requests – that can be more time consuming and error-prone … but also pays quite well too.

  • Andrew Shotland  August 24, 2015 at 8:17 am

    R.

    I agree that it’s slow sites that benefit the most from these improvements. Re conversions, this is a media site so in a sense, clicks = conversions.

  • Andrew Shotland  August 26, 2015 at 8:50 am

    That’s a serious post Andrea. That said, 2 screenshots like the ones above are typically all you should need to convince a reluctant dev 🙂

  • Eric  August 26, 2015 at 1:59 pm

    🙂

    All humor aside, I think that we could safely use data from the Search Analytics report for comparison/benchmarking purposes. It sounds like it’s using it at face value that’s probably not a great idea.

  • Andrea  August 27, 2015 at 1:01 am

    Absolutely agree Andrew 😀