Warning: I used to think building backlinks was more important than fixing site speed

For a project last year, I spent about $500 on guest posts for a client's site, but their traffic barely moved. Then I ran a Core Web Vitals check and saw their speed score was 32 out of 100. I spent a week just fixing images and scripts, and their organic traffic went up 40% in two months. Everyone talks about links, but a slow site just kills you. Has anyone else seen a bigger boost from speed work than from link building?

3 comments

3 Comments

kevinm1722d ago

Wait, but isn't some of that traffic bump just from Google's algorithm updates? I've seen sites with terrible speed still rank okay if they have strong content and links. Could your client's case be more about fixing a really broken site rather than speed being the main thing for everyone?

sam_cooper22d agoMost Upvoted

Yeah, you're right that strong content can carry a slow site. But in my case, we had decent content that just wasn't getting seen. Fixing the speed, especially on mobile, felt like removing a huge roadblock. It was like Google finally noticed the pages were actually worth sending people to. The site wasn't totally broken before, but it was just sluggish enough to get buried.

sam_cooper22d agoMost Upvoted

Honestly that's a fair point about algorithm updates muddying the water. But look at the core web vitals rollout, that was a direct signal. Sure, a powerhouse site with a million backlinks can get away with being slow, but for most normal sites, speed is a basic table stake now. It's less about a magic ranking boost and more about not getting penalized for a bad user experience. Google's been pretty clear they don't want to send mobile users to a page that takes ten seconds to load.