Website Design vs Pagespeed? Which is the Most Important?

homeriscool

homeriscool

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Hi all, I'm in a bit of a predicament. I've built a site using Avada theme and it looks great but it has a page load speed of 32 on mobile. That's terrible. That's with optimised images too.

I'm about to trash this site and build it again on Generatepress which I know is fast.

I would love your comments about this.

Speed vs design.

What is the most important from an seo & user perspective?
 
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homeriscool said:
What is the most important from an seo & user perspective?
Click to expand...

Both!

As a user myself, I take into account both when I decide whether or not I like the site, and from Google's perspective speed is the most important.

So, you have to decide who you want to please: only google, or both google and the users?
 
I would say they're equal and work together. You can't have an amazingly designed site that's too slow to load and you can't have a super-fast website with a crap layout and bad UX.
 
I tend to say the website speed is more important. What is the idea for a "beautiful" website which loads in ten hours?
Better a poor design (but user friendly) with informative content than a slower one.
 
Neither is more important than the other if you consider it from the most important factor; user experience. That's how you should be looking at your website, from a user experience perspective. Nothing is more important than that.

So, the design process takes into consideration eveything that impacts user experience...which includes speed, useability, aesthetics etc. So it's a balancing act between those factors...and sacrifices have to be made in one or more of them. So speed is not "more" important...but you do need to consider what is acceptable speed from the perspective of the visitor, and make a scarifice elsewhere if you need to.
 
You are getting 32 second Load time or your getting 32 as a speed score. If it takes 32 seconds to load the page that's really bad, a page should fully load in at least 5 seconds. I am assuming you are getting 32 as speed score.
Don't use avada. It's a blotted theme and a bad page builder. Also it got lot of bugs.
If you want fast loading webpage then use oxygen page builder. It also got good design too.
The other two factors that you need to consider regarding page speed.
1) How long it takes for the first paint?
This depends upon you are hosting server response time.
The second factor is are using cdn.
 
homeriscool said:
Hi all, I'm in a bit of a predicament. I've built a site using Avada theme and it looks great but it has a page load speed of 32 on mobile. That's terrible. That's with optimised images too.

I'm about to trash this site and build it again on Generatepress which I know is fast.

I would love your comments about this.

Speed vs design.

What is the most important from an seo & user perspective?
Click to expand...
Come May and the importance of web vitals, I say speed is becoming more important. Generatepress is fast, but Astra is also fast too.

I am migrating to Astra from a themeforest theme, because of this review:
 
Depends of the kind of site in my opinion, is most of your site traffic coming from branded search queries eg. Are they searching specifically for your site? Or are they searching for general information that they can get on 10 other sites aswell. If the last, site speed is more important than design otherwise design.
 
Think about it from a car perspective.

would people buy a beautiful lamborghini that cannot speed up as it should or rather buy a bmw or mercedes that is still quiet nice and has a decent speed and overall performance?
 
Site speed, users haven't got a 6 second attention span, they won't see your design at all if it's slow site speed.
 
homeriscool said:
What is the most important from an seo & user perspective?
Click to expand...

Both are quite important. your design improves CTR, bounce rate. Themes like Avada (multipurpose themes) use lots of javascript and css codes ( All are render blocking). U need to apply proper catching + other optimization to increase your mobile speed. I have used many multipurpose themes in past for different websites but always disappointed with the mobile speed.

Then I moved to ( generatepress,astra ,ocean wp) + Elementor and was able to manage mobile speed 80+ with autoptimize+other catching plugins. Finally I am settled with oxygen builder and without catching it can hit 70+ mobile speed easily, and with catching + optimization its always green (90+ or even 100).

For good speed:
  • less request count (html,css,js,images)
  • good server response time
  • optimized images
  • html, css minification ( JS also if not breaking your website design, load async,defer)
  • proper catching
there are plenty guide for wordpress speed optimization on this forum.
 
homeriscool said:
Ideally I want both, but the theme I chose won't allow me to have both. It has a good design but crap speed.
Click to expand...

People have been demanding performance improvements from Avada for years, but the developers haven't done it for whatever reason.

Supposedly they plan on doing it soon though, as it's the #1 voted for feature on their website.

What do you mean by 32 pagespeed score though?
Do you mean a 32 score on Google pagespeed insights?

I think you should be able to improve the score a little.

I have a website on Avada theme and a post with 2k words and 4 images scores 99 desktop/53 mobile via Google pagespeed insights on a post page with multiple images.
100/96 on GTMetrix.

It seems to be mostly the mobile implementation that loads slow/scores low, but I'm running it on $30/year namecheap hosting.
I guess I don't use much crazy stuff on my pages though too.
 
Soucha said:
People have been demanding performance improvements from Avada for years, but the developers haven't done it for whatever reason.

Supposedly they plan on doing it soon though, as it's the #1 voted for feature on their website.

What do you mean by 32 pagespeed score though?
Do you mean a 32 score on Google pagespeed insights?

I think you should be able to improve the score a little.

I have a website on Avada theme and a post with 2k words and 4 images scores 99 desktop/53 mobile via Google pagespeed insights on a post page with multiple images.
100/96 on GTMetrix.

It seems to be mostly the mobile implementation that loads slow/scores low, but I'm running it on $30/year namecheap hosting.
I guess I don't use much crazy stuff on my pages though too.
Click to expand...

Hi, the slow pagespeed is on mobile mostly.

I installed a demo site from Avada and it literally bloats the site with code and plugins.
 
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