Should you invest in site speed optimization?
September 2019
Yes! If …
- Your site’s pretty slow
- You can make it a lot faster
- The improvements you’re making are pretty cheap
Forgive the hand-wavey imprecision of those guidelines 🙏. I don’t think we can come to a universal definition of “fast enough” versus “pretty slow.”
We can make some assertions, though. Like:
- > 15 seconds Time to Interactive (TTI) is pretty slow
- 10 seconds slower than your slowest-loading competitor is pretty slow
- 5 seconds TTI is fast enough (unless you’re doing marketing for Cloudflare)
As for “pretty cheap” - the improvements should take no more than a week for the first round, and then a day or two a quarter afterward.
For most marketing sites, all this advice boils down to “install a speed optimization plugin, compress images, and move on with life.”
In the absence of overwhelming evidence that page speed directly impacts revenue, it doesn’t make sense to sweat every millisecond. Stay ahead of the slowest camper and focus on making your site usable, and your messaging clear.
Want to read more? Check out
- Page load time and revenue – the hype
- Page load time and revenue – the data
- Page load time and revenue – the anecdotal evidence