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independence2 unconnected
standing

contested · 5 claims against 1

applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

confidence

high

evidence

6 claims · 2 articles · 4 receipts

window

2024-09-19 → 2024-09-19

2 builders who never spoke to each other · contested

Make the page usable fast, not just painted fast

The marketing scripts you bolted on are probably costing you rankings: chat, analytics and heatmap tools pushed one site to nearly nine seconds before it became usable while it looked instant. Render without them and inject them once the visitor has scrolled. Whether any of this is worth your time at small scale is disputed.

Where this splits

Harry Dry documents a speed fix no human visitor would notice tripling clicks and impressions, while Eli Schwartz says technical work on a small site does not return what you put into it.

5 claims against 1

Harry Dry

Cut time to interactive, the crawler notices

  1. 01Assume the marketing tools you bolted on are costing you rankings: third-party chat, analytics and heatmap scripts hold up interaction even when the page looks instant.
  2. 02Audit your site's speed score in Chrome DevTools and look at the six component metrics separately, since the score is a weighted composite rather than one number.
the objection · 1 claimEli Schwartz

Technical work on a small site rarely pays

Do not pour effort into technical SEO on a small site. The returns are not there at that size.

  1. 03Expect a fix that no human visitor would notice to still move your rankings, because the crawler measures what the eye does not.
  2. 04Optimise for how quickly the page becomes usable rather than how quickly it appears, because the interactivity metric carries far more weight than the paint metrics.
  3. 05Render the page with none of the heavy third-party scripts present, and only inject them once the visitor has scrolled and a further second has elapsed.

What it returned

  • 8.8

    ToDesktop's content took 8.8 seconds to become usable, with Intercom for chat, Segment for data and Hotjar for heatmaps as the causes.

  • 8.8

    ToDesktop's founder implemented this in a short snippet, cutting time-to-interactive from 8.8 seconds to 0.9 while the paint figures stayed identical.

  • The weights for each metric are published in Chrome's own GitHub repository.

  • Following the June 14th change, organic clicks and impressions nearly tripled and the site moved from 25th to 11th on its main target term - correlation the author is careful not to call proof.

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

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