Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. With you, the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Speaker 1: 0:32

Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, as usual, and today I'm going to talk about a study that I've come across from. It's quite an old study, about a year's old, but it results are absolutely really interesting to think about and and this is about slow sites and how it doesn't just affect Google, how it affects real users and revenue. So this was a test that was run by the FTcom, so the Financial Times of London, like a really you know incredibly well world-renowned newspaper website, and what they did is and that's incredibly brave of them, if you ask me, they did a number of tests, but the first test they did is and that's incredibly brave of them, if you ask me, they did a number of tests, but the first test they did was they took their website and they split all their users coming in into two separate groups a control group, which saw the website run as normal, load as normal, nothing different to how the website normally runs. The other half of people coming along they put into a test group where they put a deliberate five second delay on the loading time of each page and they created this delay by using a bit of css that literally just blocked the page from rendering until a timer had passed. So essentially, these people would any link they clicked on, they'll click on the link and it would take an extra five seconds on top of how long the page would normally take to render before they saw a page. And, predictably, the people in the five-second group. They saw some very, very significant drops in engagements from this group compared to the control group and they run that for a month, 28 days. So that's very, very brave of them to almost deliberately cripple their site and cripple how users can interact with their site, but they did it to see whether it actually had an effect. I suspect there might have been conversations they were having inside their company about whether they should spend time on optimizing their site for speed or not, about whether they should spend time on optimizing their site for speed or not. Anyway, it showed such a significant drop on this five-second delay that they then decided to do another test for another month and in the second test they split all their users into four groups. So there was one group, which is the control group, which saw the website as normal, how it would normally load, and then they had a group which would have have a one second delay put on the page, a group with a two second delay and then a group with a three second delay. So that's no delay one second delay, two second delay and three second delay.

Speaker 1: 2:58

Now the key metric here that ft were looking at was how many articles a user would read during each session. So they were looking at session depth because they're a content publisher and what they need is people to read more articles. The more articles people read, the more revenue that FT will make from advertising and also, obviously, people are more likely to stay on subscriptions if they keep reading and read more articles. So this session depth was their key thing. Now the findings they had were that for short session depths, those were only people reading one or two pages that the delay didn't seem to have a great deal of effect in the initial instance. So that is, people might accept a slow loading page once or twice in a session, but as soon as it becomes clear that the site is slow overall, this is when you start to get big impacts on that session depth.

Speaker 1: 3:56

And what they could see clearly was that the longer the delay, the faster the drop-off in engagement. Now they also grouped the users by the level of engagement that they'd previously seen from these people prior to the test. So they grouped people into high and low engagement. Now what they saw was that low engagement users were impacted the most. They were the ones that were most likely to drop out if the pages were slow, whereas the highly engaged users these are users who've been using NFT for a long time and reading many pages a day previously would be a lot more tolerant of slow pages, but they would still see lower engagement than those highly engaged users which weren't seeing the page delays. But it does show that loyal users of a site will put up with more than those who aren't, but it still has a negative effect.

Speaker 1: 4:53

In addition, they also segmented people by, whether using a mobile device, a desktop device or a tablet, and they found that people with mobile devices were slightly more likely to put up with delays compared to desktop and tablet people. They surmised that, obviously, desktop and tablet people were more likely to be on a good, strong, fast connection, whereas mobile users would be more likely to have a slower connection if they're out using mobile data. One caution I would put on this this test was done in 2016, when mobile data speeds were much slower than they are now. We've got much, much faster speeds now. In 2016, even 4G wasn't necessarily as prevalent as it is now and there was no 5G. So I think that if this test was repeated now and there was no 5G, so I think that if this test was repeated, mobile users might be less likely to be as forgiving as they were back in 2016 for slow load times.

Speaker 1: 5:55

Now FTcom they said you know they surmised that this slowing of the site would cause hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of lost revenue in the short term and over the longer term, millions of pounds worth of lost revenue if they didn't take the speed of the site seriously because of the the impact on engagement that it has. Um, I mean their summary of it. I mean showed and I you know I agree with them here have it, but it's great that they've done, they've got the data on this. But it showed that the speed of a site can really negatively impact a user's session depth. You know how far they will go on your site, how much time they will give you. The slower your site, the less likely they are to to dive deeper into it, and the slower the site, the greater this effect will be. So it's clear that if you've got a site that is performing slower than what someone would expect it to, then they're just not going to give you the time of day and you're not going to get that person over the line from being someone who's just found you to someone who's going to be a follower and potentially a customer in the future.

Speaker 1: 7:08

You've really got to concentrate on site speed. It's not just for Google, I mean. I know that we've always talked about it in the previous times. I've talked about it specifically about Google, and just mentioned the negative effect on people as a side note really. But this data in this study really should demonstrate to you how important it is that you know you take site speed seriously.

Speaker 1: 7:30

Now I will share a link to the actual study and all the. You know all the data that's in there in the show notes. So if you're interested, I do suggest I'm going to read a bit. If you're interested, do go and read that. And if you have a client or a boss who is not taking any suggestions or any concerns you've got about speed seriously, then yeah, just share this, this study, with them and if it doesn't change their mind, then I don't know whatever will. So, anyway, I hope you found that useful and, um, yeah, I'll look forward to seeing you next time.

Speaker 1: 8:01

Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at keywords people use that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I'll show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any seo questions you have. You just need to go to keywords people usecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up. Once again, that's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

Speaker 1: 8:39

Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at KeywordsPeopleUsecom To get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel five on twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywords people usecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of seo is not that hard.