Fast Page Speed Equals Higher Profits: An Interview With Fili Wiese

At Pubcon 2016 in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to speak with Fili Wiese of SearchBrothers.com about the importance of website page speed. It’s in your best interest to keep page speed high, but not for the reasons you may think.

Is it true that fast pages always rank better? Is it worth investing in Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) just for the boost in speed? These are some of the questions Wiese answers in the video below. The interview can also be listened to in podcast form here.

Here are some key takeaways from the video:

• One of the key reasons to pay attention to page speed boils down to profit. You will often find that when page speed improves, sales go up.
• Technically there is a ranking boost associated with page speed, but that’s if everything else is equal. It’s seldom everything is equal, so making major changes to your website solely to improve page speed is not recommended.
• A ranking benefit that not many people consider is that the faster your pages load, the faster Google is able to crawl and index them. If it takes too long for Google to crawl the content of a website, it’s possible not all pages will get indexed. So the rankings benefit is being indexed in the first place.
• A word of advice to WordPress users is not to install and run any plugins and/or widgets that are not absolutely essential. When in doubt, there are plugins you can install which will diagnose the bottlenecks in your page load times. However, after using them, Weise recommends you uninstall and delete those as well.
• Some recommended tools for checking your page speed include Google’s PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, and WebPageTest.org.
• Site owners should check their page speed any time new changes are made to the site. In general, it’s good to get in the habit of checking page speed regularly. It will also help to check the crawl stats in Google Search Console and keep the crawl time as low as possible.
• Anytime something new comes out on the market, such as AMP, you should be looking into how it can be used to improve your site’s page speed. Optimizing for speed and the user experience never stops.

Please visit SEJ’s YouTube page for more video interviews. For more information about visual storytelling, please see the following resources:

• 11 Ways to Boost Page Load Time
• Site Speed vs Responsive Design: Which is More Important?
• The 6 Key Steps to Improve Your Website’s Loading Speed
• Faster WordPress: Need For Speed
• 7 Ways to Quickly Increase WordPress Speed