Page Speed: The Subconscious Saboteur

Did You Know? Akamai increased conversion rates by 7% simply by improving their page load speed by just 100ms. That’s 1/10th of a second. (Source)

I know it’s Friday, and I know we’ve had some math-heavy emails this week, but I’m going to hit you with one last formula before checking out for the weekend:

Level of Success = Stuff That Works - Stuff That Doesn’t Work

I know, I know…

🤯

All of us Most of us¹ want to increase our Level of Success.

To do that, you can do more of the Stuff That Works or less of the Stuff That Doesn’t Work.

⬆️ Level of Success = ⬆️ Stuff That Works - ↔️ Stuff That Doesn’t Work

⬆️ Level of Success = ↔️ Stuff That Works - ⬇️ Stuff That Doesn’t Work

You can even do both!

⬆️ Level of Success = ⬆️ Stuff That Works - ⬇️ Stuff That Doesn’t Work

Sometimes, in order to do more of the Stuff That Works, you also have to do more of the Stuff That Doesn’t Work.

⬆️ Level of Success = ⬆️⬆️ Stuff That Works - ⬆️ Stuff That Doesn’t Work

Keyword optimization for SEO is a great example. Including relevant keywords in specific places and at specific densities² helps Google understand what your page is about, but it can also feel robotic to readers. Plus, you only have one permalink, one H1 tag, etc. per page, so which of your keywords do you feature and which get relegated to Tier 2 status? Finding the balance can be difficult.

And, for the sake of completeness, you also can do less of the Stuff That Doesn’t Work at the expense of also having to do less of the Stuff That Works.

⬆️ Level of Success = ⬇️ Stuff That Works - ⬇️⬇️ Stuff That Doesn’t Work

This is commonly seen with resource allocation. Imagine a SaaS company that offers a suite of features to their subscribers. They realize one feature is expensive to maintain but only is used by a small percentage of their subscribers, so they elect to discontinue that feature to significantly reduce their expenses, but it also costs them a few subscribers who really liked that feature.

That brings us to the subject of today’s email…

Page speed optimization

Among all marketing-related tasks, page speed optimization is pretty unique.

Why?

Two reasons.

Reason #1

The perfect amount of time for your page to load is 0 seconds, which is impossible.

Think about that for a second.

Whenever you try to improve how quickly your page loads, what you’re really trying to do is make it suck less. And websites whose pages suck the least are the ones that do best.

Reason #2

No one ever says, “Oh my, that web page loaded so quickly and it really makes me want to buy this product!”

But people absolutely decide not to read your content or purchase your product if your page takes too long to load or lags throughout the checkout process.

• Pages that take 3 seconds to load have 32% higher bounce rates than pages that take 1 second to load.

• The BBC found that each additional second it took their page to load increased bounce rates by 10%, and that was 8 years ago when we were at least a little more patient than today.

• Vodafone pit two identical-looking pages against each other and found the version that loaded 31% more quickly also drove 8% more sales. (Note for the techies out there, “31% more quickly” refers to largest contentful paint.)

• Akamai saw a 7% increase in conversion rates by improving their page load speed by 100ms. That’s 1/10th of a second.

• Propellernet found pages that loaded faster than average had 34% higher conversion rates.

• Pfizer improved their page load speeds by 38% and saw a 20% decrease in bounce rates.

The Internet is littered with similar examples.

That cements page speed optimization in the “doing less of Stuff That Doesn’t Work” category.

Of course, at a higher-level there are some trade-offs involving page speed. For example, higher-quality images convert more customers than lower-quality images, but higher-quality images also have larger file sizes and take longer to load, decreasing page speed. So there definitely are decisions you need to make regarding how much to optimize for page speed.

But page speed itself?

There’s no point at which someone goes, “That page loaded uncomfortably quickly. I’m outta here!”

So, how do you optimize your page speed?

That’s a discussion for next week!

Look at everything we covered this week!

In case you forgot—or haven’t yet read, shame!—here’s what we discussed over the last week:

• Monday: Super-Simple Sample Size Calculation

• Tuesday: Evaluating Statistical Significance

• Wednesday: Persuade with Power (and Data)

• Thursday: A 5-Star Customer Review Strategy

• Friday: Page Speed: The Subconscious Saboteur

Got any questions about those subjects or want to suggest something for next week? Just reply to this email to let me know. See you Monday!

(Oh, we also have some footnotes today.)

Footnotes

1. If I’ve learned anything from cinema and TV, it’s that one specific group actively is trying to decrease their level of success: female owners of professional sports teams. Even after doing some research, I can name just 3 examples of movies or TV shows where a woman owned a professional sports team:

• Major League (1989)

• Jerry Maguire (1995)

• Ted Lasso (2020-2023)

In both Major League and Ted Lasso, the female owners actively were trying to sabotage the team! And even in Jerry Maguire, when the female owner wasn’t actively trying to sabotage the team, they still had her owning the worst professional sports franchise in American history: the Arizona Cardinals, who have existed since 1898 and are the oldest professionally-run football team in America. They haven’t won a league championship in 77 years—the longest active drought in US professional sports. The Cardinals are so bad, this list of the worst franchises forgot to include them.

tl;dr Don’t run your business like a woman runs a sports franchise, apparently.

2. Keyword optimization isn’t really that formulaic in today’s modern search engine, as large language models (LLMs, think ChatGPT) make it easier for search engines to understand topical relevance without including keywords in specific places and at specific densities, but you get the idea.

Everyone say, “Hi!” to Keith O 👋

Question: If you could have any superpower, but it had to be completely useless, what would it be?

Keith O’s Answer: “I don’t know if this superpower is useless but it would drive me crazy. I know the answer to everything in the universe like whether God exists or if there are aliens and even the truth about every conspiracy theory but when I try to explain these truths to anyone they only get more confused or it reinforces their conspiratorial beliefs.“

Editor’s Note (from me, Bryan): Dude, Keith. Who hurt you? That sounds BRUTAL.

ChatGPT-Generated Joke of the Day 🤣

What do you get when you cross a snowman and a vampire?

Frostbite!

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