One of my clients has a site that gets about 1k visitors per day, heavily dependant on SEO, nothing massive, but big enough to see the effects of certain changes.
After I refactored one of their pages to go from 1.5 sec initial/8 sec total page load to 0.04 sec/4 sec load times there was no discernible change in rankings or traffic.
Page load as SEO is totally over egged for the most part as it's one of the things developers can easily measure and point a finger at, along with number of requests, CSS file size, etc. while everything actually meaningful for SEO is absolutely black box.
Every time I get handed a "SEO site report" by a client I can immediately tell if the SEO guy is any good or not if the report actually contains anything else other than recommendations to improve page loads, reduce requests and all those practically useless, but very expensive in developer time, actions. Oh, and the obligatory spreadsheet with all the external inbound links domains. Because that's really insightful.
If one improves a factor on their own site, it doesn't mean that will make a lick of difference in rankings because:
1. That may not be the factor holding a site back, and
2. It may be the site is performing as good as possible because users do not want that type of site in the SERPs.
SERP construction - what goes where - has a bigger impact on rankings than any one other factor, e.g. maps vs images versus news, and that has less to do with one's own site, and more to do with user feedback.
After I refactored one of their pages to go from 1.5 sec initial/8 sec total page load to 0.04 sec/4 sec load times there was no discernible change in rankings or traffic.
Page load as SEO is totally over egged for the most part as it's one of the things developers can easily measure and point a finger at, along with number of requests, CSS file size, etc. while everything actually meaningful for SEO is absolutely black box.
Every time I get handed a "SEO site report" by a client I can immediately tell if the SEO guy is any good or not if the report actually contains anything else other than recommendations to improve page loads, reduce requests and all those practically useless, but very expensive in developer time, actions. Oh, and the obligatory spreadsheet with all the external inbound links domains. Because that's really insightful.