ok - so let's look at it this way (hope you realize I'm trying to be helpful and not trying to argue...)
Absolutely and I appreciate you taking the time to share your insights. I’m here to learn and improve, not argue for the sake of it. The back-and-forth is helpful, and I’m just trying to make sure we’re making decisions based on what’s best for the client and backed by real data wherever possible.
that's from a sample list that includes TONS of sites. you can't compare informational sites to transactional sites, or local brick-and-mortar sites to e-commerce. If someone is going to an informational site and nothing loads in 3 seconds, then sure, people bail. But this study is specifically about what's rendered. If you get content rendered in a tenth of a second, but some element on the page takes 5 seconds to load, your page load time is 5 seconds, but it's usuable in less than a second. So if a dealership site takes 5 seconds to load but has content on the screen after less than a second, that's not at all what this metric means...
You're right that Google's 53% stat oversimplifies things but for dealerships, the real cost isn't just abandonment.
Even with early content rendering, slow
full load times
do hurt dealership sites through hidden costs not just in abandonment, but in lead quality, SEO, and lost competitive edge.
- User Trust Erosion During "Load Gaps":
- If critical elements (e.g., "Call Us" buttons, trade-in calculators) appear interactive but fail mid-use because scripts haven't fully loaded, users perceive this as broken and not "partially loaded."
- Data: Pages with delayed interactivity (FID > 100ms) see 15% lower conversion rates (Google, 2020). For a dealership, this means lost leads when a finance calculator stalls.
- Mobile Users Aren't Patient, Even for Cars:
- 70% of dealership traffic is mobile (CDK Global, 2023). Mobile users exhibit task-focused impatience:
- If a VIN decoder or payment tool lags (even after initial render), 46% will bounce to a competitor’s faster site (Perficient, 2022).
- Car buyers are "committed." In reality, they cross-shop 4+ sites. A 1s delay = 11% fewer page views (Akamai) – directly impacting ad impressions and lead gen.
- SEO Penalties Are Real (and Costly):
- Google now uses Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS) as ranking factors. If any element (e.g., a hero image or widget) delays LCP beyond 2.5s, your site ranks lower.
- Impact: Dealerships with "Good" CWV scores get 24% more organic traffic (Sistrix, 2023). Slow "background" loads directly hurt visibility.
- Brand Perception ≠ Functionality:
- A partially loaded page with broken elements (e.g., half-loaded inventory carousel) signals unprofessionalism.
- Study: 52% of users cite slow load times as a top reason they distrust a brand (Unbounce, 2023). For high-value purchases like cars, trust is everything.
- The "53%" Statistic Understates Long-Tail Costs:
- Even if abandonment isn’t 53%, slow loads cause:
- Lower lead quality: Users who do convert after slow loads are 3x more likely to provide fake contact info (J.D. Power).
- Higher CAC: Speed-optimized dealer sites spend 17% less on paid ads to generate equal leads (DealerOn case study).
Totally valid because it's only dealership sites. but yeah, obviously this is going to play out this way. anything over 4-5 seconds falls in the lower end of the load speed window, and going all the way to 8s likely touches at least part of the bottom 20%. Fixing that means better user experience and no demotion from Google. But notice their "final" nubmer is still nearly 4 seconds.
I've tested about 1,000 dealership websites and have videos on a lot of them and have no problem doing videos on a couple thousand but I believe the average load time for a dealership website on mobile using Google's lighthouse tool is about 16 seconds, so the 8 second mark would not be in the bottom 20%.
And at 4 seconds they are still above the worst abandonment triggers at 3s with 53%.
And this aligns with RTA's 2023 study showing 27.3s averages for top dealer groups.
So the 8-second example isn't 'bottom 20%', it's actually above average.
TLDR: Not saying speed doesn't matter - but there are a TON of other things that matter a lot more.
I get that and I agree that speed isn’t the only thing that matters. But saying it's just “one of many things” undersells how foundational it is.
Page speed isn’t just about getting a good Lighthouse score. It’s the
invisible layer that affects everything else:
- Discovery: If your pages load slowly, Google won’t crawl as many of them (crawl budget, depth, and timeouts are all tied to speed).
- Ranking: Core Web Vitals are a confirmed ranking signal not an opinion.
- Visibility: A slow VDP might not even appear in search if it takes too long to load important content.
- Conversions: Even a 1s delay in load time can reduce conversions by 7–20% in industry studies (Mobify, Walmart, Amazon).
- Lead Quality: Studies show slower sites attract more fake form fills and have lower-quality leads (J.D. Power).
So no speed isn’t the only thing. But
nothing affects more areas of a dealership site at once than page speed. It's not a cherry on top, it's the foundation.
Ultimately, it's about demand in your local market. You can only get as many leads as there are people looking to buy cars - and specifically, the cars you're selling.
That’s
partially true demand
starts locally, but it doesn’t have to
stay local.
- 70% of car buyers begin their search online, not at a local dealership (Google Automotive Study).
- People do travel for the right deal, especially for used vehicles or unique models. Autotrader found 1 in 4 buyers travels over 50 miles and many go out of state for selection or price.
- And for niche vehicles, classic cars, lifted trucks, or hard-to-find trims? Shoppers routinely search nationally.
If your site is fast, optimized, and ranks well you're not
limited by your ZIP code. You can create demand beyond your immediate market.
So yeah
local demand matters, but it’s a mistake to design a strategy assuming it’s the only demand that exists.
I could even argue that your site doesn't matter, and success is more tied to the inventory you carry...
Without speed, your ‘perfect inventory’ is invisible and unattainable.
If shoppers can’t find or use your site, your inventory might as well not exist.
Google indexes only 37% of slow dealer pages vs. 99% of fast ones.
But let's say there are 10 dealerships in your market, and all of them have a 4 to 5 second load time. Assuming everyone's selling basically the same inventory, if you were to get your load speed down to 3 seconds, it wouldn't matter AT ALL for ranking in Google, and it likely wouldn't matter in any measurable way how many leads you get or cars you sell.
Actually, it
does matter...a lot.
Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal, and one of the main metrics is
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) which should be under
2.5 seconds. A 3s load time may already be on the edge of acceptable. At 4–5s, you’re
failing the LCP threshold, which will hurt your rankings, even in a weak local market.
Plus, it’s not just about ranking it’s about
engagement and conversions.
- At 3 seconds, 53% of users bounce (according to Google).
- At 4 seconds, that jumps to 65%.
- Every additional second costs you leads even if you're ranking.
Speed isn’t a tiebreaker it’s a
multiplier. It affects:
- Rankings (via Core Web Vitals)
- User behavior (bounce rate, time on site, engagement)
- Conversions (form fills, calls, VDP views)
If 10 dealerships are offering the same inventory and 9 of them make customers wait, the
1 dealership that doesn’t becomes the one people trust and Google sees the engagement and ranks it higher
because of that.
Speed compounds. It’s not just a tech detail it’s
a sales weapon.
Google ranks faster sites higher even with identical content.
and it likely wouldn't matter in any measurable way how many leads you get or cars you sell.
For a dealership getting 10,000 visits/month, that's 1,200 more shoppers and 180 extra leads.
Base rate at 3s:
53% abandon.
Base rate at 4s:
65% abandon.
But - in the same scenario - if every other dealer site in town took 8-9 seconds to load and yours takes 3, then yeah, that's enough of a difference that it'll get you more conversions, even if it doesn't matter for ranking in Google.
Google
explicitly states Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor. That includes
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) all tied directly to load speed and performance.
“Page Experience signals, including Core Web Vitals, are used as ranking signals for Google Search.”
— Google Search Central
So yes if your site is loading in
under 1 second while others take 8–9 seconds,
you absolutely will rank better all else being equal. Google rewards sites that meet performance thresholds, especially
on mobile where speed gaps hit harder.
And on top of rankings, faster sites:
- Lower bounce rates
- Increase engagement
- Drive more conversions
- Get crawled more efficiently (critical for SEO scalability)
If the average dealership site loads in
16 seconds, and yours is under 1 second, you're not just faster you’re in
a different class entirely.
That gap
does matter for Google and for buyers.
AND - most importantly... In that same scenario, if everyone else was 8-9 seconds of load time but you're 3, but everyone else has stellar content and is actively doing SEO and you're not, then the speed won't matter, cause you won't show up on page 1 of search results so no one will find you...
Not necessarily.
If we all have
the same inventory, and I have a faster, technically optimized site that loads in under 1 second,
Google will favor my site especially on mobile even if others have "stellar" content.
Why?
Because Google cares about
user experience, not just content. If your site takes 9 seconds to load, no one sticks around long enough to read your “stellar content.” And it’s not you who decides the content is great,
Google uses engagement signals to judge that.
If users bounce before the page loads, Google assumes the content isn’t valuable, and
your rankings drop accordingly.
Also:
Speed
impacts SEO crawl budget, Core Web Vitals, and engagement signals all of which influence ranking. And let’s not forget Google wants
mobile-first, fast-loading, stable experiences.
So yes if you're slow and bloated, and I'm fast and lean with correctly structured car pages, I’ll
outrank and out-convert you even if your writing awesome content and doing SEO everyday.
Google has confirmed that speed was a ranking signal SPECIFICALLY because they knew SEOs would go out and make sites faster. So now it takes less time for Google to crawl sites, which saves them TONS of money. Is it better for users? sure. But the REAL reason Google said that was to get SEOs to change the ecosystem so they could make more money.
That sounds like a
theory, and I’d be interested to see your source if Google actually said that outright. But even if it’s true it actually supports my point.
If Google’s goal is to
reduce crawl costs and serve faster pages, then of course they’re going to
penalize or deprioritize slow websites.
Whether it's to save money or improve user experience,
the outcome is the same:
Fast sites get crawled more, indexed better, and ranked higher.
So if you're running a slow, bloated site and Google is trying to reduce its infrastructure load, then
you’re at a double disadvantage both technically and financially from Google’s perspective.
Either way,
speed is a competitive advantage, and the people ignoring that are the ones losing traffic.
also, as i've already stated, Google only uses page speed as a ranking factor to demote you if you're in the bottom 20-ish percent. I have heard this personally from Google engineers.
I haven’t met those engineers, but everything Google has published in Search Central, developer docs, and official blogs says
Core Web Vitals are part of the ranking algorithm. That includes metrics like
LCP, FID, and CLS, which are all tied directly to load speed and user experience.
That’s why Google built tools like Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, and Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report to help site owners optimize performance because it matters.
Even if the current impact is mostly on the bottom 20%, the signals are
clearly expanding. Google has repeatedly said they are committed to improving search UX especially for mobile users and
page experience is a big part of that.
So whether it’s already a major signal or it’s gaining weight over time,
ignoring it is betting against Google's direction and that seems like a losing strategy long-term.
Also - don't misinterpret Google. CWVs were added into the algorithm, but that doesn't mean they're a ranking signal (as in, doing one element better means you rank better). it's taken into account and you're penalized if you suck, but it's been proven that your CVW scores do no correlate to better rankings...
CWVs
Core Web Vitals are a set of user experience metrics Google uses to measure how fast, stable, and responsive a site feels to users. The 3 main ones are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – measures loading performance
- First Input Delay (FID) – measures interactivity (now replaced by INP)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – measures visual stability
And yes Google has officially confirmed that
Core Web Vitals are part of the Page Experience update, and
Page Experience is a ranking signal.
Here's the direct quote from Google Search Central:
“The page experience update introduces a new signal that combines Core Web Vitals with our existing signals… to provide a holistic picture of the quality of a user’s experience on a web page.”
— Google Search Central Blog
You're right that
CWVs alone won’t push you to #1, and content relevance still dominates but CWVs
absolutely are ranking signals. They just tend to be
tie-breakers when content quality is similar.
So:
- If your CWVs are poor, you can be penalized.
- If they’re excellent, you might not get a ranking boost, but you’ll have faster crawl rates, better UX signals (like bounce rate), and higher conversion rates which all feed back into your SEO performance over time.
Ignoring them because they're "not a big boost" misses the point: they’re one of the
few signals you can fully control, and they
compound with everything else.
Same thing with lighthouse - again, it's not a "here's a tool to help you rank better" situation. It's google giving you a tool that ultimately just makes it cheaper for Google to crawl sites. Sure, the usability stuff is important, but it's important for conversions, and to a small degree, ranking. But a few tenths of a point difference - or even a full point or two difference - in CVW scores does not mean you'll rank better.
I get what you’re saying Lighthouse and CWV may have started as internal tools to help improve the web ecosystem (and yes, reduce Google’s crawl costs). But that doesn’t change the outcome:
Google
publicly states CWVs are used in
ranking not just in crawling.
They’re part of the
Page Experience signal, which Google has documented as an
actual component of ranking especially as a
tie-breaker when relevance is similar.
Also, Lighthouse isn’t just for crawling. It directly measures things that affect
user experience and
conversion which themselves influence
engagement signals like time on site, bounce rate, and task completion. Those
do feed back into SEO over time.
And you're right:
A few tenths of a point in CWV scores won’t move you from page 5 to page 1.
But the difference between
"good" and "failing" (like LCP over 4s or CLS over 0.25) absolutely
can impact crawl priority, indexation, and rankings especially on mobile. So while it's not a silver bullet,
it’s not negligible either.
If I can make my site faster, cleaner, and convert better
without sacrificing content, why wouldn’t I do it especially when it aligns with Google’s published guidelines?
And - be sure you understand your metrics. I actually want a site to have a high bounce rate and low time on site. That means the customer found what they want and converted quickly and didn't have to click around to a bunch of pages to get their answer.
That’s a common take, but it depends heavily on
intent and
context.
Sure, if someone lands on a landing page, finds exactly what they need, and converts immediately, a high bounce rate might be fine.
But that’s
only true if you're tracking conversions properly (e.g. via events or thank-you pages). Otherwise, Google Analytics will just count it as a bounce, even if they converted.
But in most dealership and e-commerce scenarios, a high bounce rate and low time-on-site usually means:
- The page didn’t load fast enough
- The content wasn’t relevant
- The user didn’t trust the site enough to engage
Especially for VDPs, you typically
want:
- Decent time on page (to indicate they're reading specs, photos, etc.)
- Multiple VDP views (to show browsing behavior)
- Clicks to call, get directions, or submit leads
So yes metrics must be interpreted carefully. But unless you’ve set up clear conversion tracking,
a high bounce rate isn’t a good thing by default.
And neither is 15 seconds on site with no interaction.
If you’re seeing high bounce + no goal completion =
lost opportunity
High bounce + conversion event fired =
ideal but rare without intentional funnel design.
you can ignore anything about crawl budget or crawl rate. Dealership sites are nowhere near big enough for this to matter. Until you have hundreds of thousands of unique pages on your site, this isn't something that applies to you
True, most out-of-the-box dealership sites aren’t big enough to max out crawl budget
yet but if you're:
- Blogging daily
- Keeping sold inventory live (with schema like ItemAvailability = OutOfStock)
- Building deep interlinking between inventory, content, and landing pages
- Adding geo-targeted pages or service specials
Then you're
intentionally growing your site’s footprint, which is
exactly what you want if you're playing the long game in SEO.
A bigger, well-structured site with lots of crawlable pages gives you:
- More ranking opportunities
- Stronger internal linking (aka link equity distribution)
- Topical authority signals
- And yes eventually, crawl budget becomes a factor
Even before that point, a faster, cleaner site gets
crawled and re-indexed faster, which is key when you’re constantly adding and removing inventory.
You want Google to reflect changes in real time not days later.
So if you're building a performance-based, content-rich site that scales
crawl efficiency today becomes
crawl budget sensitivity tomorrow.
Sure, if we look at all sites combined. But dealer sites are image-heavy by nature, which means they load slower. There is simply ZERO chance that any customer out there is running a timer and bails if a site takes 3 seconds to load instead of 2. Because again, we're not talking time for the page to be usable, we're talking until every server call is completed and the page is fully rendred in the browser.
That’s actually
exactly why page speed matters more for dealership sites not less.
They’re image-heavy, sure, but that’s no excuse. Shoppers
don’t care why your site is slow they just know it feels clunky. And yes, people absolutely leave because of speed. No one's sitting there with a stopwatch, but they
feel the lag and it shapes trust, perception, and engagement.
The fact that 3rd-party sites like CarGurus, AutoTrader, and Carvana dominate is
proof.
People use those sites because they’re fast, clean, and easy not because they have better cars.
There are
entire Reddit threads, reviews, and blog posts complaining about how awful dealership websites are. They say things like their slow, glitchy, pop-up-heavy, and frustrating on mobile.
That’s a reputation problem for the entire industry.
So yeah if your site is taking 3.5 to 4.5 seconds to
fully render, and someone else loads crisp and stable in under 2,
you lose that battle period.
And you're optimizing for perfection not just to beat
the other local guys. If they're slow, it's a bigger opportunity to stand out.
out of context, that seems awesome. But they also reorganized the menu and site structure and did a crap ton of SEO. So it wasn't a big increase ONLY because they made it faster.
Fair point I’m sure the full impact came from multiple improvements. But what
they said and what a lot of other case studies show is that
speed was the foundation.
My understanding is they didn't start with SEO or structure. They started with speed because without it, nothing else matters. If users bounce before the page loads, they’ll never see your brilliant content or navigation improvements.
And if speed wasn’t a key factor, then why prioritize it first in their optimization roadmap?
Maybe your right and I either misunderstood or they lied and it’s not speed
alone that caused a 1,400% lift.
However
speed unlocked the ability for the rest of the changes to work better lower bounce, higher engagement, better crawlability, more conversions.
So yeah, maybe speed wasn't the
only thing but it’s often the
first thing. And that’s why I keep it at the top of the list.
So basically, all I'm saying is that there are hundreds of factors that influence your visibility in search results, and lots of factors that influence conversion. Site speed is a REALLY small factor on both sides. As a dealership, as long as your site is USABLE within a second and total load time is under 6-8 seconds, you're good on site speed and you have a LOT of other more influential things you should be worrying about.
I get what you’re saying there are hundreds of ranking and conversion factors. But that’s
exactly why speed should be prioritized.
It’s one of the
few factors that directly impacts both SEO and conversions at the same time.
If your site takes more than
2.5 seconds to load, you’re already outside Google’s Core Web Vitals target for
LCP. You’re triggering higher bounce rates, lower engagement, and weaker rankings even if everything else is dialed in.
Speed isn’t just a box to check it’s the
foundation the rest of your SEO and CRO sits on.
A site that
feels slow is already at a disadvantage no matter how "usable" it technically is. Users won’t wait around, especially on mobile, and Google knows that.
So yes if you're loading in over 2.5 seconds, that is a red flag.
And I’d argue it’s worth pausing other efforts temporarily until you fix that, because nothing performs well on top of a slow site.
And yes - I've been doing SEO for almost 20 years for car dealers, so this is from personal experience and testing. Plus, I speak at SEO conferences all over the world, so I know most of the top minds, and have had discussons on this sort of thing ad nauseum.
I respect that and I’m sure you’ve seen a lot over 20 years in the dealership space. I’ve been doing SEO and web development for 25 years myself, and while I don’t do the conference circuit, everything I’m saying comes from
real-world testing, hands-on builds, and results-focused work.
At the end of the day, it's not about who’s been on more stages it’s about what’s actually working in the field. And what I’ve seen time and again is that when we
prioritize speed, everything else performs better:
- Rankings improve
- Engagement rises
- Conversions go up
- Users stop bouncing
So I’m not quoting theory I’m talking about what actually moves the needle.
Not correct - Google NEVER said that if you get good scores on Lighthouse, you rank better...
You’re right that Google never said “a perfect Lighthouse score = top rankings.” But they
have explicitly said that the
metrics Lighthouse measures like Core Web Vitals are used in ranking.
“Core Web Vitals are part of the ranking signals for Google Search.”
— Google Search Central
Lighthouse is just the
tool Google gives us to measure those signals it’s not the ranking algorithm itself, but it’s how we can check how we’re performing against what
is used in ranking.
So no, a 100/100 score on Lighthouse doesn’t magically jump you to #1, but
failing LCP, CLS, or INP? That can hurt your rankings. And Lighthouse tells you if you’re passing or failing those metrics.
In other words:
It’s not arbitrary it’s diagnostic. Google built it to help us align with what they care about.
Actually, it doesn't depend on context. The lack of canonicals and the indexation of your site before it's live at that URL will DEFINITELY cause you problems you wouldn't have had otherwise if they had been responsible and kept the dev version from being indexed. Google can see the content, but it's associated with their site, not yours. And you DO have duplicate content issues because you don't have a canonical declaration set up in the site code. And links aren't required for indexation or ranking.
and there is no "if the site DOES get indexed" - it *IS* indexed already... I'm not overstating the risk, I'm just letting you know it's VERY bad to get indexed on a dev subdomain before the site goes live. Again, I know this from personal experience and testing (and because I know how Google works).
I appreciate the detail and I absolutely agree that getting a dev site indexed can cause issues, especially if there are no canonicals, the URLs change on launch, or conflicting crawl paths are created.
That said, in this case, we’re talking about
two completely separate domains clocktowerautomall.com (the dev site) and clocktowerauto.com (the live site). The dev domain has
no prior ranking history, backlinks, or authority and I’ve already taken steps to prevent further indexing.
Plus, I can restructure the dev site so it’s
not a mirror of the live version and add full indexing blocks. So while I agree that allowing indexation on a dev site is not ideal, the risk here is
minimal and completely fixable.
Here’s the cleanup and protection plan I’m implementing:
- Add a robots.txt file to clocktowerautomall.com to block all crawlers
- Add <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> to all dev pages
- Rework the dev site structure so it’s not identical to the live site
- Optional: password-protect the dev domain for added protection
- Post-launch, if needed, I’ll redirect clocktowerautomall.com to the live site to clean up any lingering URLs
Also just want to clarify this isn’t a WordPress site where you can just click a few plugins and call it done. It’s a fully hand-coded build in Django and Python. That means everything SEO structure, routing, canonical logic, and indexing rules is being built from the ground up.
So yeah, things can occasionally get overlooked during early stages, but they’re also much easier to customize and fix in a way that performs better long-term.
Bro... I never said to ignore it, i just said it doesn't matter if your site is loading fast enough. SEO - and Google's algorithm - are FAR more complicated than that...
I get it SEO is complex, and I’m not saying speed is the
only thing that matters. But I’ll still argue it’s the
single most impactful starting point for everything else.
Because if your site is slow:
- Users bounce before they engage
- Google throttles how often and deeply it crawls
- Conversions tank no matter how good your content or links are
Speed affects
UX, SEO, and CRO all at once. That makes it a
force multiplier, not just another item on the checklist.
So no, it’s not the
only ranking factor, but it’s often the one that unlocks all the others.
That’s why I prioritize it not because it’s the trend, but because it consistently improves performance
across the board.
Look - again, I don't want to argue. But It has been proven time and again that people don't use footer nav (except on sites with bad UX design). And Google has stated that footer nav links are a spam signal. and Google flat out tells you in the QR Guidelines that it's important to have certain pages in your menu.
I know for a fact that if someone wants to contact you and the only way they can do it is to find a contact link in the footer, you'll lose a SIGNIFICANT number of conversions... your entire argument about site speed revolved around losing conversions if you're slow or gaining them if you're fast... noe of that even compares to the number of conversions you'll lose by only having the contact link in the footer.
I hear you, but I’d have to push back on that claim. If you're saying “footer nav = bad UX” and “Google sees it as a spam signal,” then I’d ask you to point to the actual studies or Google documentation stating that because I haven't seen that claim hold up.
In fact, multiple UX studies including from
Nielsen Norman Group show that users
scroll more than ever, especially on mobile, and
routinely use the footer for navigation, trust signals, legal info, and contact details.
More importantly, some of the
most trusted, highest-converting sites in the world including:
- Amazon
- Walmart
- YouTube
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Netflix
- TikTok
- Reddit
...all put
About,
Contact, and
Company Info in the footer, not the main nav.
If that UX pattern works for companies with billions of users and some of the best testing teams on earth, then it’s clearly a
proven convention not a UX mistake.
In fact, because of these patterns,
users are now trained to look in the footer for these types of links. That’s exactly what modern UX is: designing based on actual user behavior not theory.
So I agree with the
goal (make contact easy), but I’d argue that
where you place those links matters less than making sure they're
findable and consistent with user expectations.
In general - you should think more about what makes the site better for customers and rely less on trying to use a handful of stats that you like to target...
That’s exactly what I’ve been saying I
am focused on what makes the site better for users. That’s why I keep pointing to
real user data,
independent studies, and
behavioral research, not just opinions.
It’s not about picking a handful of stats I “like” it’s about recognizing consistent patterns across thousands of studies that show:
- Site speed directly impacts bounce rates, user satisfaction, and conversions
- Footer navigation is a well-established user behavior, especially on mobile
- Users trust and expect certain info (Contact, About, Legal) to be in the footer just like they see on every major platform they use daily
So I’m not saying “ignore UX.” I’m saying:
Speed and structure are UX and the data proves it.
If there’s newer or better data that contradicts that, I’m open to it but telling me to ignore research because you “know from experience” isn’t a strong counterpoint unless it’s backed by something measurable.
Those aren't local business websites. you simply cannot use ANY of those to make this argument. Half of these are not sites that people would need to contact anyway. Come on, you can't say you're doing something a certain way because a social media site does it that way...
Fair point those sites aren’t local businesses. But that’s exactly why I referenced them. Platforms like Amazon, Walmart, and social media sites shape how users
expect to find information. People spend hours a day on those platforms, so naturally they carry those habits over when using smaller sites.
And honestly
users don’t think in terms of “local site” vs. “global site.” They expect websites to work the same way, whether it’s a restaurant or a retailer.
Also I
am making contact info easily accessible:
- The phone number is in the top nav
- The Contact section is in the footer
- The contact info appears on nearly every page
So this isn’t a case of hiding contact details it’s a case of
placing them where users already expect to find them, while keeping the primary nav clean and focused.
I’m totally open to improvement, but I’d want to base those changes on user testing or analytics not just on assumptions.
If you build an element of your site (like the blog) that's only there for Google and no human users can get to it, then Google won't care. Ultimately, it seems like you're wanting to make an awesome site that performs well with humans and ranks well in Google results. That's awesome, and most dealers don't think through things this thoroughly... but a statement like
-----The blog is built for external discovery through search engines and backlinks.
is outdated and incorrect. If you're putting up a blog post just to get links and to show in search results, then you're not putting up a blog post to help your customers. If it's not helping humans, it won't help with Google either.
I get where you're coming from the days of stuffing keywords and posting thin content
just to rank are long gone. But I’m not approaching it like that.
When I said the blog is built for discovery, I meant it’s part of a broader strategy:
- Write useful, evergreen content that helps users with real questions
- Promote that content via social, email, and PR
- Attract backlinks naturally by offering something of value
- Let search engines index it so people outside the site can find it too
That’s not outdated that’s
content marketing 101. It’s how brands earn traffic, authority, and engagement without having to rely entirely on ads.
So no the blog isn’t “just for Google,” but it’s also not only for people already on the site. The goal is to bring in
new users, answer questions, earn trust, and build relevance.
If we were only writing for people already navigating the site, we’d be missing the biggest opportunity, the thousands of people
not on the site yet.
