Prioritizing speed problems

- [Instructor] As you work through this course, you're going to find lots of speed problems on your website. And you may not know where to start when it comes to fixing things. When it comes to speed fixes or really any kind of technical fixes, the best fix is one that'll actually get implemented. While you'll end up with lots of website fixes as a result of watching this course, and we cover how to prioritize those in the prioritizing technical SEO fixes video, site speed is a particularly important issue and one that deserves some additional attention. When you start evaluating a website for speed problems, just write out everything you notice. Don't start prioritizing just yet. Think of it like an ideas brainstorm. There isn't any judgment yet, you're just throwing ideas out there. Then once you think you found everything you can, you can start sorting these ideas into a few groups. I want you to ask yourself three questions as you sort this. First, would fixing this issue put you in the yellow/green section for web vitals? This of course assumes that the page in question is in the red for web vitals. I recommend watching the earlier video on Google's core web vitals for more details on this. Since there are only three specific things that Google is looking at in their core vitals, this issue could be entirely outside of the scope of the web vitals we're looking at. For example, on the wisdom pet site, there's an extremely slow loading Pinterest embed which is significantly slowing down the total load time of the page. However, that embed isn't actually negatively impacting the web vitals such as LCP. So while you might want to fix it, it really isn't urgent. Second question, do you already have people that you can talk to you right away and are available to help you get these fixes implemented? Perhaps a fix requires changes to the website code but your developer can't fit you in for a month. Maybe you need access to an image compression tool to fix up your images, but you need approval first to use it. These are things that can slow down the implementation. Push off things that can't be fixed right away, and instead focus on the things where you have resources ready to assist. Third question, overall, is this a quick fix or will it take a significant amount of work to implement? You may need to talk to a web developer to get a sense of how long it'll take to get some of these fixes implemented. Other items such as poor website architecture or zero all tags and images are easily fixable but incredibly tedious. Write down any very long tasks like that into chunks where you focus on the segment of the most important pages first and then move down your list. These three questions aren't quite like the classic fast good or cheap question where you can only choose two. Instead give points to each fix based on if you answered yes or no to each question. Then, you should be able to prioritize on a scale of one to three. Three points is the best because it ticks all the boxes. It helps with vitals, you have resources, it's quick. And one are the items you might want to put off till later unless it's a serious technical issue that is causing you to have truly horrible wet vital scores. And you suspect the visitors are turning away in droves because your site is so slow. In that case, it may only fix one particular issue but that issue is incredibly important. And if you're having trouble getting speed fixes implemented, try saying this, it often works for us. If your site is so slow that people decide to hit the back button instead of waiting, you wouldn't even know because your analytics program would not have recorded them before they left. You may not know how much traffic and subsequently money you're losing because of a slow site. That should help you get the resources you need devoted to fixing up site speed.