WEBSITE SPEED Is MORE IMPORTANT THAN BACKLINKS
LIVE CASE STUDY - IMPACT OF WEBSITE SPEED IN GOOGLE RANKING
We are in the SEO Industry for over a decade, We have Analyzed 15000+ sites in the last 10 years.
When Google announced Speed as a Ranking factor For Mobile Searches in July 2018.
There Were Tremendous Changes in Google. Results While doing Usual Keyword Tracking Task, We saw a PHP Based Static Website Outranked Few of our Clients Site, Even With a Poor Backlink Profile. To be Precise those pages had No Backlinks. and Root domain Had MOZ DA 1 and AHREFS DR3. Initially, we thought he may be using some BLACK HAT SEO Tactics.
Because our Niche Had a Mid Keyword Difficulty(KD 40 – KD60). Getting into Top 10 Position in Google Needs Atleast Domain Rating OF 50+ And URL Must Need Backlinks From 80+ Referring Domains. But That PHP Site Had DR3, And Had Zero Backlink to The URL that Ranked in #1 Position.
As a SEO and We designing Company, From the starting of the Project, We Spent Lots of Time and Effort.
- We had optimized for SPEED using Premium WordPress speed optimizing Plugins. (PAGE SPEED INSIGHT Score of 71 For Mobile and 85 For Desktop.)
- Our sites Were Hosted in a Good VPS. (GOOGLE CLOUD)
- We had a Very Good Backlink Profile (links from Wikipedia, Mashable, .edu, Gov sites, etc).
- Our Domain Rating Was 54, and the URL We Tried Rank Had 40 Backlinks From Related Niche.
- And Our Articles Were 3000+ Word Long.
But a Static PHP Based website with just 700 word article Outranked our client Site. Even without single backlink.
So we dug deep to Research more, we did a Reverse DNS search to find other websites hosted in the same IP address. unfortunately that website was Hosted in a Shared Godaddy Hosting. So We had to find different way. we did a reverse AdSense search to find sites using the same AdSense codes in websites. The result was mind-blowing. The same person had 20+ sites on different niches almost in similar design. some of his sites were Ranking so well Even with Poor backlink Profiles., in the mid to hard Keyword Difficulty (60+ KD) niches like insurance, finance, Casino, CBD, Health, VPN, Gaming etc…
Even for some keywords THAT STATIC PHP SITE
GOT RANKED IN TOP 10 POSITIONS
multiple times.
Then We Checked PAGE SPEED INSIGHT To Check Website Speed Score. The Result was Mind Blowing. That PHP SITE HAD PAGE SPEED INSIGHT SCORE OF 90 For Mobile, and 94 For Desktop. that’s the Highest Page Speed Score We Saw for Mobile until that day.
We Knew that Website Speed Plays Crucial role in google Ranking Factor . But we didn’t even thought that fastest Website can outrank Other Sites Easily Even without backlinks. So we decided to Optimize Our sites More. our WordPress development team Almost spent 2 weeks in fine Tuning our Theme. Even We Re wrote the Entire WordPress theme to Load Efficiently. We Removed few WordPress Plugins , and Wrote important Plugin functions directly into themes function.php to decrease number of requests. But That did’t helped Much either. (We managed to get only 79 on Mobile, and 86 on Desktop For PAGE SPEED INSIGHT). We switched our Server From VPS to Dedicated. that too did’t Shown Promising Result. Then We Tried Almost Every Server software and Cache Combinations .
- apache
- Nginx
- Nginx Proxy in front of Apache
- lightSpeed
Nothing Helped Much, But while Monitoring Server Load, we noticed MySQL was busy on queries, and that caused 70% of total load in server. and WP was bloating the Database with plenty of Queries and that caused the slow downs and That Cannot be Changed. So We have to Think Out of Box.
so we decided to write our own PHP BASED CUSTOM custom Front end that can Fetch data from WP Backend. From the Scratch we Checked every part of speed95 functions in Page speed Insight For identifying the Slow Part. whenever Pagespeed insight shows Speed Score less than 95 for Mobile, we will rewrite the logic for the specific function. Thats when we named our Front End as SPEED95. after many Code Rewritings we Managed to Get 99 and 100 Results for Mobile and Desktop in google Page Speed insight and GT Metrix.
NOT JUST FOR HOME PAGE. EVERY PAGE IN SPEED95 SCORED 95 PLUS IN GOOGLE PAGE SPEED INSIGHT.
EVEN PAGES WITH 20+IMAGES WILL LOAD IN A BLINK.
THE BREAKTHROUGH
Just 24 days After Switching to SPEED95, Our Client Site Got #1 Position Back. Not Just For the Lost Positions. Also We Got Ranked in First Page For Thousands of New Keywords With LOW and Medium KD Keywords. Even Our SPEED95 Outranked Biggest Authority Sites Like Amazon, Wire Cutter, NDTV for some HIGH KEYWORD Difficulty Keywords.
Then We Switched All Our Own ADSENSE and AMAZON AFFILATE Sites to SPEED95 FRONT END. As like Previous Success, all Our Sites Shown Promising Result. Even Some of our Sites Got More than 30x Traffic Hike. And Speed95 Integrated Single Site Earns 5000$ On AVG using AdSense. And In The Last One Year that Single Site Alone Made 45,000$ in total Just Using AdSense.
Initially We installed our SPEED95 PHP front end for our clients sites and on our own Sites. But within few months we started to get Hundred Plus Queries Regarding Customizations and installations from Random Peoples and Business. And After So Many Discussions With Our Team And Clients, We Decided to Make SPEED95 Available to Every One. So we added it as Product in clouds11 as SPEED95 Front END.
