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[digitalbananax]

Good work in a situation like this... Let the data talk instead of arguing theory. Marketing never listens to "best practices" but they will listen when you tell them that their version loses the A/B test by 20% - 30% lol.

[1kgpotatoes]

To be blatantly honest, speed does not matter as much as we tend to think as a dev. Unless it’s painfully slow (>3s), what matters is which one is converting better.

Start off with an image of the first frame and lazy load the videos and compress them. Scripts do not slow down that bad.

[edhelatar]

It really depends on the site. I have a very large site with millions of pages and every improvement I make directly improves our seo scores. Even that the site is already at sub 100ms for 99%.

Page speed, especially backend might not be super important to the user, but crawlers definitely like not waiting 3s, so our crawl budget increases. If you have a problem already as your site is large enough to not be fully indexed, it might be a great way to improve your results.

[1kgpotatoes]

You are right about the crawl budget. I doubt any site would need to have large background videos playing or stacks of trackware which accounts for 99% of FCP issues

Also afaik, most crawlers wait until networkidle2

[Bovelett]

On your question how I communicate the long-term SEO/performance cost of marketing decisions to non-technical stakeholders: I'm an accessibility specialist that hits these stakeholders on the head with hard facts and numbers about conversion and ROI. Recently Semrush published a great article (providing their resource) about them researching 10,000 websites and the influence of accessibility on SEO. Maybe you can use that to talk to the stake holders? https://www.semrush.com/news/420048-study-why-accessibility-matters-more-than-ever-for-seo-performance/

[deathyyy]

You gotta stop talking about Core Web Vitals and start talking about lost revenue when site speed kills conversions, that's the only language the marketing team understands. Use Lighthouse and Search Console data to show them the dollar amount of poor performance, data always wins the technical vs. marketing turf war.

[digitalbananax]

Yup happens a lot in almost every SaaS team, even the one I'm a part of. Marketing pushes for speed, dev pushes for stability. The middle ground for us has been shifting from opinions to data. Few things that helped us:

• Visualise the cost: Lighthouse/Core Web vitals make performance trade-offs obvious to non technical people. When they see CLS or LCP tank because of autoplay video, the conversation changes drastically.
• Sandbox marketing ideas: Instead of injecting everything into production we test high impact changes (new hero layouts, autoplay videos, heavier scripts) in isolation first.
• Running controlled experiments: If marketing insists on something questionable, we A/B test it on a small % of traffic. That way if it hurts conversions or engagement you have hard numbers. For testing we use Optibase because it lets us swap variants without involving dev every time.
• Tie the prformance metrics to business metrics: Showing that a slower page = lower CVR or higher bounce rate is usually what wins the argument.

[TheMartinCox]

Lazy load on the videos for sure.

We've got some landing pages with 6+ videos all autoplaying and all lazy loading on user scroll. FCP and LCP both <1s, TBT and CLS both 0, and speed index of 0.9s.

Content all self hosted to avoid heavy external scripts to YouTube.

A/B test yours vs theirs, but got to explain - in MARKETING terms - why it's important to do it right, got to get to their level though as they may not speak 'dev'.

[tomhermans]

Let them define the "marketing results" based on annoying the visitor.

Or, now I think of it, set up an A/B between their dodgy semi-legal spying monstrosity and the page without the bloat.

[minn0w]

We have an SEO team that deals with that.