Did you know that some of the biggest names in the SEO industry have websites with disastrous Performance Scores?
Or at least the scores are bad at some unknown end of the world…
Check yourself!
Open Google Pagespeed Insights and audit the homepages of your favorite brands.
For example, I put moz.com and got a performance score of 42. Next, I put ahrefs.com, and I got a performance score of 35.
Don’t get me wrong…
I love these brands, and I’m grateful for everything they do for the SEO community worldwide.
The point is that even they don’t strive for perfection.
But still, their Google rankings are pretty good because of the many other factors that have a role in calculating the rank of their web pages.
So perfectionism is our enemy…
And a big one!
If you bet on perfectionism, you are at risk of wasting your time and money on additional services, software, and custom web development that is supposed to improve your technical SEO but at the cost of diminishing returns, i.e., you will spend big and get marginal improvements.
The question then is:
Where is the thin red line between Overoptimizing and Underoptimizing?
Good technical SEO is the solid foundation for everything else you do, so you don’t want to be a cheapstake either.
To solve that dilemma, I advocate for a simple 3-step formula that tells you straight away do you need to invest more in your website or it’s good enough.
That formula successfully cures my unreasonable strive for perfection and helps me move forward faster so I can learn from a shorter feedback loop. That means I make improvements based on real-life data. That’s very important.
We should always strive to minimize the role of our assumptions.
But before I share with you that 3-step formula, let me clarify something:
Even Google itself doesn’t demand perfection from us…
First, they have defined ranges of scores. If your performance score were between 0 and 50, it would be considered “bad.” If it were between 50 and 90, it would be considered “needs improvement.” And if it were over 90, it would be considered “good.”
And there are various signals that everything above 80 is acceptable.
Second, the Core Web Vitals are based on browser usage statistics, and if your website is fast for most of its visitors, it will be considered OK from a technical standpoint. It doesn’t matter if it loads slower for users at the other end of the globe as long as they aren’t the primary audience.
And third, it’s all query-based and relative. You don’t compete with the fastest websites on the web. You compete with the websites that target the same web users.
As you can see, there are several parts in motion here, and neither of them mandates “perfect optimization.”
The 3-Step Formula
The formula I mentioned earlier helps you discover where your website stands in the market and how much optimization it needs.
Step 1 is to check your metrics with Lighthouse.
It’s an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. You can run it against any web page, public or requiring authentication. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more.
You already have it installed with your Chrome browser, and you can find it by opening the Developer Tools and clicking on the “Lighthouse” tab.
Or you can install a browser extension.
If you need more info, google it. There is a ton of information on turning Lighthouse on and using it.
When you audit your web page with this tool, which means you gather the so-called “lab data,” all the scores you get must be colored in green.
Why?
Because when you use that tool, it audits the pages using your device. And your device is probably closer to the data center where your site is hosted, so the information travels quicker between the server and the laptop/workstation.
Those are as perfect as network conditions get, and if your site has low scores in these conditions, it will perform even worse for users that are further away.
So that’s Step 1: Make Lighthouse gives you only scores colored in green.
Step 2 is to use Lighthouse once more, but this time to check out your main competitors’ websites.
As I mentioned earlier, you don’t need to compete with the fastest apps and sites on the web. You need a slight edge over the others trying to rank web pages for the same keywords.
So step 2 is to take out your keywords lists, collect your competitors’ domains, and compare their Lighthouse scores with yours.
Step 3: Realize that everything above 80 is acceptable.
Decide is it worth it to continue working on your Technical SEO. Maybe you can get a bigger return on investment if you focus on content creation. Maybe more link building will give you a better advantage. If you calculate that there are better things to work on, just kill your perfectionism.
Don’t let it control you.
In conclusion…
I really like this 3-step formula because it’s fault-tolerant. We all make costly mistakes by working long on assumptions.
So when we adopt a more agile optimization methodology, we can allow cheap mistakes while collecting valuable feedback that helps us improve our decision-making.
And that’s cool.
