One thing we try and hammer home with customers is that downtime equals zero speed. In the quest to make their website faster and pass Google’s Core Web Vitals test, many people ignore simple things that would reduce or eliminate downtime entirely. After optimising thousands of sites, this is the insight I would share if we were sitting down over lunch talking about website stuff and SEO.
Table of Contents
Avoiding the common mistake
We get so many enquiries about speeding up websites and nine times out of ten what people are really looking for is a boost to their SEO, and to pass Google’s Core Web Vitals test in order to lift their rankings in the search results.
The crazy thing is, while faster sites definitely make a difference in SEO, I don’t see anyone explaining how this actually works. Usually it gets about as deep as “Google said speed is important” or some other throwaway line that is about as useful as someone who barely knows how to use a doorbell, never mind a computer, telling you “being on that Google thing is important”.
This often results in people focusing on the wrong thing, like achieving a specific speed score in some random tool because someone with no business giving advice wrote about it in a Facebook group. I see it every day in our enquiries inbox: “we MUST have a 100 score in Google PageSpeed Insights”. This is the wrong approach and ultimately means you leave money on the table because your focus is in the wrong place.
Three ways site speed impacts SEO
There are three distinct ways site speed impacts SEO. Uptime and reliability is probably the most important of the three and often the most overlooked. People go wrong on this one all the time in site speed land.
Downtime equals zero speed
The uptime and reliability of your site and hosting provider really matters. It makes logical sense when you think about it for a minute: downtime is essentially zero speed, so we should probably start our speed optimisation process by making sure we have as little downtime as possible. This is mostly why being on a bad, cheap host like Bluehost, HostGator or GoDaddy is a problem.
When I see people talking about site speed improving rankings, it is most often when they move from a bad host to a good host. They see their speed improve, see their rankings, organic traffic and conversions improve, and conclude that speed is clearly better for SEO.
What has actually happened is they have improved their site’s reliability, and Google can now crawl it without hitting frequent errors or intermittent downtime. In most of the cases where there is a clear organic traffic and rankings improvement after speed optimisation work, it is due to the site’s reliability being improved in some meaningful way, not because the site is faster.
Two simple but not obvious fixes
These are two recommendations we make in both our site speed audits and SEO audits:
- Renew your domain name for as long as your registrar allows. Accidental domain expiry is one of the most common reasons for downtime. Renewing your domain for 10 years will cost you $100 to $150 and effectively eliminates the risk of downtime from domain renewal issues.
- Get uptime monitoring in place. This alerts you to downtime when it does happen and also helps identify whether your site has intermittent issues or is occasionally exceeding the limits of your hosting plan. If your site is highly monetised, monitor the top 5 to 10 pages, not just the homepage. UptimeRobot has a free plan that monitors on 5 minute intervals, so there is zero excuse not to spend 10 minutes getting this set up. We have a rundown of the options in our guide to uptime monitoring tools.
If you want to go further than monitoring, we have written up the full set of steps we take to reduce the risk of downtime. Start there before you spend another hour chasing a PageSpeed score. A site that is reliably up will do more for your rankings than one that is marginally faster but falls over every other week.
This article was first sent to the WP Speed Fix email list. Subscribe here to get the next one in your inbox.