PageSpeed Vs Page Size

[ashishb01]

Hi,

We all know that Google doesnt like slow loading pages, fair enough! However, for one of my websites, user interactivity is key to its success. Now each of my pages are fairly large sized (ranges in the order or 1.8 to 2.5 MB) because it has a lot of pictures, css and at times some Java script elements.

However, I have tried to ensure that the code is optimized - for example html minified and compressed, caching enables, images optimized and served through CDN, etc. In spite of high page size, my GTMetrix PageSpeed score is 93+ for most pages.

However, the number of requests served is 100+ and page loading time is 4.5s + as per GTMetrix and Pingdom.

My question is - should this matter from an SEO perspective. Is google likely to penalize me for high loading time even though I am serving highly optimized pages? I really dont want to cut down on the user interactiveness of my website unless I have to from an SEO perspective.

Please suggest. Here is my homepage, just as to give you an idea of what i am talking about:

www.dealwithautism.com

[ashishb01]

Thanks Cyrus and Max,

Very good answer and I am going to work as per your suggestions

[Cyrus-Shepard]

As Max said, from a ranking perspective, Time to First Byte seems to be the most important factor. The same author of that post offered some tips to improving time to first byte: http://moz.com/blog/improving-search-rank-by-optimizing-your-time-to-first-byte

Oftentimes, you simply have a lot of assets to load and it's difficult to cut anything back. In these cases, the order that things load becomes increasingly important for user experience (asynchronous java script, for example).

Regardless, doing everything you can to improve speed and checking with Google Page Speed Insights is usually the best advice. I've never, ever seen a website where improving speed performance didn't help with traffic metrics (wether rankings or engagement) so I believe it's an investment worth making.

[max.favilli]

What google really cares about is the TTFB (Time To First Byte), to check it just head for GWT, in crawl stats.

To date the general consensus is above 1s is bad and google could penalize you, below .5s is good and google could improve your ranking a little bit.

Google suggest using webpagetest to check a website performance: if you run the test for your website you will se the TTFB is not that bad: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/141124_MF_14DY/

Your overall load time is 10s and I agree is too much, it's supposedly worse your user experience, increasing your bounce rate and alienating some of your visitors. You should work to improve it, webpagetest suggest to compress images and use leverage browser cache, which are good suggestions.

Analyze closely the waterfall to investigate further and identify other areas of interventions.

[Shakur]

Hi there,

I think it would improve page load if the youtube video was the last to load.

Hope it helps you.

[ashishb01]

You are right! Which is why I dont want to compromise on usability. Thanks for your response

[webtheoria.com]

give it some time! It should be ok. The main issue with speed should be if the users are fine with it. Think of people before SEO and you ll be fine!

[ashishb01]

Thanks for your response, but the images are possibly as optimized as they could be. I use ImageOptim for Mac to optimize them, they are all jpegs (stripped from all metadata) and enabled for (mild) lossy to WebP on supported browsers.

Do you feel there might be anything else that I could do?

[webtheoria.com]

Am sure you could work on the optimization a bit more, especially of the images.

none the less if you require the same structure and you are unable to change the size then I would not worry so much about it. Having a fast website is only one of the hundred of different factors that affect SEO. Just work on the other factors and it will be fine!