How to hack rankings with page speed optimisation

© 2019 Delete
@POLLY_P #SEARCHLEEDS
How To Hack  
Rankings With  
Page Speed Optimisation
POLLY POSPELOVA // DELETE AGENCY

1. Why page speed is important.
2. How it aﬀects rankings and conversions.
3. How to hack rankings with page speed optimisation  
(based on a real experiment).
What We’ll Cover.

Google uses
over 200 ranking
factors.

• Security
• Page speed
• Structured data (schema)
• Content quality
• Quality backlinks
• Local and other signals

Why is page speed
important?

1. Page speed has
a significant effect
on conversions.

© Copyright 2019 Delete
It takes 
15 seconds
to fully load
a mobile
landing page.

That’s far too slow.
53% of mobile site visits
leave a page that takes
longer than three
seconds to load.

Mobile site speed vs bounce.

Every second
counts.  
Speed has a
direct impact on
revenue.

2. Page speed has
on search rankings.

Back in 2010, Google
said page speed was a
ranking factor on
desktop searches. In
2018 it extended to
mobile searches.

Yet, there’s been
little evidence of it
clearly having an
impact.

Searchmetrics tested
landing pages that
rank in the top
20 search results for
10,000 keywords.

Page 1 Page 2

3. Page speed has
on landing page
experience, Quality
Score and CPC.

Quality Score and CPC.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
decreased by 50.00%
decreased by 44.20%
decreased by 37.50%
decreased by 28.60%
increased by 16.70%
Google Benchmark
increased by 25.00%
increased by 67.30%
increased by 150.00%
increased by 400.00%
YOUSAVE
YOULOSE
Source: Click Equations

£100,000 Google Ads Budget
Quality Score 
change from 4 to 7
= £50K+ savings.

“So speed is something that does
matter quite a bit to us and it has
a big effect on users, so that’s
something that I would personally
take quite seriously and I think the
the nice part about speed is there
are various tools that give you
pretty objective measures that
you can actually work on.”
John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

Introducing
Lighthouse.

An open-source,
automated tool for
improving the quality
of web pages.

It oﬀers
opportunities for
optimisation and
estimated savings.

Why do big brands
score so low?

It isn’t easy!

The criteria is
changing fast.

Same site today.

But we
already did
a lot, just 18
months ago!

What does it take
to get the perfect
score now?

Hackathon.

We challenged
ourselves to get a
100% score…
without changing
how the site
looks.
R&D experiment.

Old vs New

Requests sent by page on first load // 17 vs 36
Volume of data transferred on first time load // 0.32 vs 2.5 Mb
First page load finish in // 2,39 vs 6,39 sec
Critical loaded in // 0.9 vs 2.3 sec
Speed Index // 1.3 vs 5.2
-53%
-870%
-63%
-61%
-75%

Significant changes
Rankings
improved,
in some cases
by almost
TWO
SERPs.

1. HTTP/2.
2. Image quality.
3. Critical.
4. Only load what you need.
5. Modern JS.

1. HTTP2.0.

HTTP/1 HTTP/2

HTTP/1

HTTP/2

2. Image quality.

Deferring offscreen
images.

Some images are not
visible on tablets.
WIDE MEDIUM

• We load all images.
• Universal HTML,
CSS and JS.

Serving images in
next-gen formats.

The new WebP image format provides
better compression than a PNG or a JPEG.
This means faster downloads and less
data.

JPEG
11kb90kb
WebP @ 50%

Properly sized
images.

Adaptive image
sizes.

Old.

The adaptive images markup is generated automatically,
we don’t ask our designers or UI developers to do it.
New.

Lazy load.

The images only load when they get into the
user’s viewport and not before.

3. Critical.
BRIGHTONSEO

Abrowser doesn’tstart rendering apageuntilitloads
andparsesallresources.

The first load.

We only take the necessary resources (JS, CSS) for a page
and then inline them into HTML markup, in a <head> tag.

After theinlinemarkuploads, wethenload allthe
necessaryresourcesin thebackgroundand cachethem.

Next load.

We check if the browser already has the
resources cached and we skip inlining.

The content loads instantly
on the ﬁrst and all subsequent loads.

4. Only load what
you need.

We broke up all the CSS and JS into small ﬁles for each logical
block. This included: the form, header, footer, navigation etc.

HTTP/2 is ideal for loading lots of tiny resources
quickly and without latency in one connection.

5. Modern JS.

Old.
The evaluation time of Modern JS is 300%
faster and the ﬁle size is 20% less.
New.
The Modern JS evaluation is 41
milliseconds compared to 133
milliseconds, which is a huge

My advice.

1.
It is time for SEOs
to work closely
with developers.

Unless you can tackle
a Lighthouse Trace
on your own.

2.
Page speed
optimisation is
not a one-off task.

What scores 100%
today, will not score
the same tomorrow.

100% is possible!

Learn more and
download the slides
here:
www.deleteagency.com/lighthouse

Thank you.

How to hack rankings with page speed optimisation

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