Optimizing page speed for enterprise-level websites is a challenge. Beyond suggesting improvements, your success as an enterprise SEO specialist depends on understanding the web team’s technology stack and their performance budget.
This article simplifies the process, providing information to help you tailor recommendations and effectively negotiate for a stronger page speed strategy.
Page Speed for Business Sites: Key Considerations
Developing page speed recommendations after a technical audit is quite simple. But to implement your recommendations? That’s a different story.
Moving the enterprise search needle requires learning more about the web team’s work and collaborating with them.
In the search for companies, it is often necessary to convince the web team and others who manage the technology of web operations and business.
To ensure your suggestions are taken seriously and acted upon now and in the future, you should:
Understand the technology stack of the web team. Understand your performance budget.
These steps will save you time by avoiding proposals that will not be implemented.
Dig deeper: 6 steps to a winning business SEO strategy
Understand the technology stack of an enterprise company
If you work with an enterprise web team, chances are they have business-required elements that add to the entire website technology stack. This includes everything from what the website is made of (like the CMS) to scripts that track analytics and marketing.
You can use BuiltWith to analyze a website’s technology stack. Just enter the website URL and it will provide you with the site’s detailed technology profile so you know exactly what you’re working with.
In the NBA.com example below, you’ll see several elements running on their site that take up bandwidth, including:
Marketing: Business email software.
talk: Business Marketing Automation Platform.
Adobe Omniture: A website analytics tracking platform.
This will give you an insight into what is already running on the site. This is just the beginning.
The hard part is formulating a business case for implementing page speed recommendations. But before you do that, you should review your web team’s performance budget.
Dig Deeper: What Your Business SEO Audit May Be Missing
Understand your web team’s performance budget
Google defines a performance budget as:
“[A] set of limits imposed on metrics that affect site performance. This can be the total size of a page, the time it takes to load on a mobile network, or even the number of HTTP requests being sent. Setting a budget helps start the conversation about web performance. It serves as a reference point for making decisions about design, technology and adding features.”
– Performance budgets 101web.dev
If you’re lucky, the organization you’re working with will already have a performance budget for you to review before running the technical/page speed audit.
If you find that the web team you work with doesn’t have a performance budget, I recommend taking a look web.dev resources on the subject
For the business site I was working on, I suggested creating a performance budget to guide the web team on what aspects of page speed to focus on. Initially, they had none, which led to uncertainty. After checking in later, I learned that they had implemented one.
So what does performance budgeting do with page speed optimization?
It allows your web team to set fences on what they will invest time and energy in from a performance optimization and resource/page speed standpoint.
This is very important information for you as you go into your audit and recommendations. Knowing your “guardrails” will help you navigate your conversation with your web team.
All of this will feed into the things you’ll study for your page speed optimization recommendations, which may include Core Web Vitals.
For example, let’s say you’re auditing a category page and notice low performance scores after running a Lighthouse audit.
In this case, you may discover issues related to the current server configuration regarding First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
With your knowledge of your web team’s performance budget, you’ll know what you can and can’t negotiate.
Work with enterprise web teams
By combining the knowledge of what your company’s website is currently working on (technology stack) and what budget you have to work with (performance budget), you can now technically audit your page smarter and complete and be ready to negotiate your way out. to improve site performance and gain SEO.
In my early agency days, I learned a valuable lesson: never accept “can’t be done” from a web developer. Through negotiating issues like URL fixes and redirects, I discovered that there is almost always a solution in web development.
A product manager recently shared a similar experience with engineers. Despite initial resistance, showing evidence of a competitor or phrasing requests differently often led to solutions. Remember, it’s not just what you say, but how you say it.
Dig deeper: Business SEO: Why ‘best practices’ don’t cut it and what to do
Business Page Speed Optimization: Understanding technology stacks and performance budgets
Knowledge is key when optimizing business page speed.
Review the website’s technology stack for potential limitations to recommendations. Understand performance budgets to align with web team priorities.
With this knowledge, you can propose actionable optimizations aligned with the web team’s roadmap.
Convincing them to implement page speed recommendations can be difficult. However, approaching them with an awareness of the limitations of their technology stack and performance priorities paves the way for collaboration and impact.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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