A response to Does Page Speed Really Matter for S.E.O.? (March 2024)
In March 2024 I pushed back on a lot of the fear marketing around page speed. My view was that speed matters, but its impact on search rankings is overblown:
“One reason I didn’t address speed last time is because I believe that page speed’s impact on S.E.O. is overblown.”
I argued that Google cares above all about relevance. A slightly faster page doesn’t make its content any more relevant to what someone searched for. And I warned that chasing the last few milliseconds gets very expensive, very fast.
I still believe most of that. Relevance is still the name of the game. But I have to be honest about why I was so quick to say the last stretch of speed wasn’t worth it.
Why the last few percent was so expensive
Here is the line I want to look at again:
“And squeezing those milliseconds comes with exponential expense”
That was true in 2024, and I know exactly why. Our sites ran on a page builder. A page builder loads its own styles, scripts, and wrappers on every page, whether that page uses them or not. Add a few third party add-ons and plugins and the baseline weight climbs further. Getting a site like that from good to great meant fighting the framework itself: stripping out assets, deferring scripts, and tuning caching until something broke. That is exponential expense.
So I told clients not to worry about it. Optimize your images, use a caching plugin, and spend the rest of your budget on content. Given the trade off, that was the right advice.
Speed by subtraction
The agentic revolution changes where speed comes from. When AI agents write custom code under experienced direction, we don’t need the page builder at all. We build on our own AI-native theme, and each page loads only what it actually uses.
That means a lot of the performance I said was too costly to chase now comes for free. It isn’t the result of heroic tuning at the end of a project. It is the result of never adding the weight in the first place. A lean page is fast before anyone runs a speed test.
So I no longer have to ask clients to choose between spending on content and spending on performance. We can have the fast pages and the budget for content. That trade off is gone.
What still holds
A few things from that video haven’t changed at all.
Relevance still matters more than milliseconds. Google still keeps its algorithm secret, and anyone who claims speed is the key to rankings still knows no more than the rest of us. Good content, written for real people, is still the best investment you can make in search.
Images are still the biggest factor in how fast a page loads. I said:
“Without question, the biggest page speed factor is the images it contains.”
Still true. A custom theme can serve the right image size for each layout automatically, which helps a lot. But someone still has to choose good images, and avoid uploading a giant photo where a small one would do.
And speed still matters most for people, not search engines. Visitors notice a sluggish site, especially on a phone. A lean site is simply a better experience.
The better answer
If you asked me today whether page speed really matters for SEO, I’d give you the same first answer. It matters some, and relevance matters much more.
But I’d add a second answer I couldn’t give in 2024. You no longer have to pay extra to get a genuinely fast site. Take away the layers, and the speed is just there. Then spend your time and money on the things that actually move search results.
¡Viva la Revolución!