Yoast Site Speed

Yoast Site Speed

I don’t think it’s too much to assume with years to learn about the very best performance SEO strategies (the Yoast SEO developer said in 2010 site speed is a ranking factor) and the skill set of those behind Yoast (very good PHP programmers and assume they know a little about web servers, hosting…) that if the developers behind Yoast considers performance and site speed as important they’d be very good at performance SEO by now.

That’s not too much to assume right???

Do this Google search:

site:yoast.com "site speed"

This will list all webpages under the yoast.com domain that uses the exact phrase “site speed”, October 2014 there’s 50 results.

Yoast quotes related to site speed:

“Your website’s speed has an impact on almost every bit of “performance” of your website. Speed impacts rankings, it impacts conversions and average pageviews per visitor, basically, not working on your page speed means you’re losing money. Which is why we obsess about it and that is what we write about it in this category.”

Another Yoast page speed quote:

“Do I need to say it again? Make your site load as fast as you can. Install W3 Total Cache if you’re on WordPress and you haven’t done it yet. Get proper hosting if it’s still slow after that (test with Pingdom, f/i), and yes, I urge you to try (affiliate link)”

And another Yoast optimizing speed quote:

“do know one thing: I’ve had several clients whose sites were too slow, and who, after being properly optimized for speed, got better rankings.

And heck, if it’s a ranking factor, this is one of the easiest ones to get right.”

From the Yoast WordPress SEO Tutorial:

“2.4 Aim for speed

A very important factor in how many pages a search engine will spider on your blog each day, is how speedy your blog loads. You can do three things to increase the speed of your WordPress.”

“So, it’s clear, when you can, you should reduce the number of HTTP requests.

There’s usually three parts to this play:

Reduce the number of JavaScript files
Reduce the number of CSS files
Reduce the number of images”

You can find lots of mentions of site speed on the Yoast site. Nothing wrong with any of the advice above, reading the website you’d expect Yoast developers to be site speed experts.

Can we all agree the Yoast developers understand site speed is important SEO wise and with that in mind the Yoast domain should be super fast and be using the very latest performance SEO techniques. They are selling you the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and other SEO services they offer on improving site speed.

So why are the Yoast Pagespeed Insights Tool Results so piss poor?

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