Website Speed Testing: SEO vs. UX.

By Brad Walker \ October 22, 2024

Balancing robust experiences, findability, and performance.

You’ve got a beautifully functional site that is ready to launch. You run a Google PageSpeed Insights test and see a low mobile score (under 70 – potentially very far below 70) and a somewhat better desktop score. Time to panic? Maybe, but not necessarily.

Emotional Impact vs. Performance and SEO

Well-engineered and designed websites heavily rely on thoughtful UX, great design, microinteractions, and gorgeous imagery to emotionally and strategically connect with visitors. The more bells and whistles added to a website, the bigger the performance concern. In a very real way, we are glad for this trade-off because, without this natural throttle, the web would be even more of a circus than it already is. 

On the other hand, the tasteful and strategic use of interactivity and motion can elevate the overall user experience and help meet the website’s goals. The tension between a well-designed, emotionally moving website and a good speed performance score (and the ensuing SEO boost) is real. 

Why is there a tradeoff between performance and UX in the first place? 

To boost user experience, designers and developers typically use advanced CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and rich multimedia content, such as video, heavy images, sound, etc. The more code and content a webpage houses, the heavier (download size) it is. The heavier a page is, the lower the page speed score, especially for mobile downloads, since the tools used for testing artificially simulate slower network connections than most people enjoy. 

And yes, you can manage the mobile user experience on highly experiential pages by timing what loads on the device and when, but while most of these techniques are widely used, they don’t do anything to mitigate the lower load scores or the impact on SEO. 

Fortunately, Google uses page relevance as the top factor for SEO ranking (for now), however, page speed is still a factor (source). The exact weighting of factors is not publicly known. This leaves us having to strategically balance a page’s level of interactivity and its SEO value. 

How are other sites performing?

Knowing that weight matters, many major websites err on the side of user experience as they have relatively poor mobile scores (some even have poor desktop scores). These major sites set the tone for what users expect regarding load times in general. After visiting Amazon (mobile speed score of 45/100), YouTube (34/100 on mobile and 41/100 on desktop), for example, a pattern or convention is established that throttles users’ expectations.  The mobile speeds for ten randomly selected higher education websites signal the same preference and tradeoff. This non-scientific sample includes Ivy League schools and other private collates, state schools, community colleges, etc., with average mobile speed scores of 36.3 and desktop speed scores of 59.

Does this mean we don’t even try, then? Not even close. 

How to Improve: Step-by-Step

Unless your speed score is perfect, running a PageSpeed test is the best place to start. Some of the recommendations made by this tool can consume more time than they are worth, however, here’s our shortlist of the biggest potential speed gains that won’t compromise the user experience.

• Image optimization: Ensure that images are sized appropriately—not too large, but not so small that the resolution is poor. Most modern CMS systems have tools and extensions to optimize image assets during publishing. 
• Minifying CSS and Javascript: Reduce unnecessary characters (spaces, line breaks, etc.) from CSS and Javascript files to reduce the overall file size, allowing these crucial aspects of a site to load faster.
• Optimize Caching: Apply server-side optimization strategies, including component and page-level caching to greatly improve a PageSpeed score.
• Lazy loading: Now that this can be done natively and with relative ease in the browser, set non-critical images to load only when needed (aka scrolled to in the viewport), allowing the page to load much faster.
• Reduce third-party code: Do not add too many trackers to your site, as they slow the load time. Some are critical (like Analytics), but adding too many extraneous scripts can quickly slow things down.

Conclusion

The absolute worst time to care about load times is right before launch. During strategy, register the project’s desired load speed goal and ensure everyone understands the decision’s pros and cons. And then, the UXers, designers, and developers will engineer and design accordingly. 

Call us crazy, but an alternative strategy is to design for where people are in their journey. If they are just starting out on their journey, let the highly experiential pages be highly experimental (engineered with lower mobile scores on purpose). When they are further along their journey, meet them on the search engine results page with highly SEO-calibrated content that answers their specific questions.