SEO SOP: Find Global Page Speed Fixes by Sampling Five Pages

Most page speed audits test one URL, usually the homepage, and call the score a verdict on the whole site. Erika Braeger, Director of Strategy at Ten Speed, tests four or five. When she came back on Unscripted SEO and I asked for the one thing you should do after listening, this was it: “Don’t sample only a singular page because not every page is going to tell the same story.” This SOP turns her sampling habit and her page-weight decision tree into an audit you can run this week.

Objective

You finish with a short, ordered list of page speed fixes, with the global ones at the top. A global fix is a problem that shows up on several of the pages you sampled, which usually means it lives in a template, a site-wide script or a shared component. Fix it once and every page that shares it gets faster. Erika works this way because it is how you “identify what the global fixes are and be able to make a bigger impact early on as you work down your list”, and because on enterprise accounts the first visible win buys you the next ticket. Budget an afternoon for the sample and the triage.

Key Steps

1. Pick four or five pages, not one. That is Erika’s number. Spread them across the page types you actually ship, for example the homepage, a core product or service page, a blog post, a category or resource page, and a landing page with a form. (inferred – she gives the count, not the mix) A sample of one template tells you about one template.
2. Test every page the same way, on mobile and desktop. Run each URL through the same tool, such as PageSpeed Insights, and log load time and total page weight in one sheet. Her baseline questions are plain: “Is the site fast? Does it load well on a mobile device? And does the site have strong technical health?”
3. Flag any page at or near two megabytes. Erika’s rule of thumb: “I believe the page should be two megabytes or less. Ideally a lot less.” Her reason: “It’s not that the crawler is going to pass you over, but it’s going to take a lot more time.” Treat two megabytes as the line where you zoom in, not as a target.
4. Name what is adding the weight. On each flagged page, find the heaviest elements. Her checklist: “Is it a video? Is it an image? Is it a motion graphic? Is it a form fill? Is it a reCAPTCHA?” Then check her other usual culprits: images sized incorrectly (they slow the load and cause layout shifts), third-party JavaScript firing before user-facing content, video that isn’t set to an iframe or autoplays, and a hero image set to lazy load.
5. Run each heavy element through the decision tree. “Do we replace it? Do we modify it? Do we remove it?” Write one decision per element. Replace an autoplaying video with an iframe embed. Modify an oversized image. Remove the reCAPTCHA or the script nobody can defend.
6. Sort the fixes into global and page-specific. If the same culprit shows up on three of your five pages, it is a global fix and goes to the top of the list. A problem on one page waits.
7. Ship the biggest global fix first, then announce it. On enterprise accounts Erika starts with the global, big ticket items because they move the needle, and when they do, she takes the win to every team it touches. In her words: “you have to work with the pieces that are going to make the biggest splash first to get buy-in to continue to build trust across the organization”.
8. Re-test the same pages and work down the list. Run the same five URLs through the same tool after each release so the before and after compare like with like. Erika’s own client cadence is new work every week, each delivery chosen by “what is going to move the needle the most.”

Cautionary Notes

• Never lazy-load the hero. “I’ve seen where a blog image, like the hero image of the blog or a hero image of a core page, is set to lazy load, and that can really scramble things.” Load the hero first and lazy-load below the fold only.
• Don’t present Erika’s two megabytes as a Google rule. It is her rule of thumb for total page weight. Google’s documented limit is different: when crawling for Search, Googlebot crawls the first 2 MB of each supported file and the first 64 MB of a PDF, measured uncompressed. That is per file, such as the HTML, not the whole page with its images.
• Don’t stop at speed when URLs change. Erika’s other top pitfall is tech debt from URL updates: a client sunset a blog without redirecting it, and because it was linked across the site it created 4xxs. Redirect every retired URL as it ships, using 301 redirects.
• One fast page proves nothing about the rest. If your sample is all one template, you have not sampled.

Tips for Efficiency

• Offer image fixes as good, better, best. What a client can do depends on their server and their developers, so Erika presents options instead of one answer. On WordPress, a compression plugin is often the “good” tier.
• When a client asks whether speed matters, compare. If they lost a position in a SERP or an LLM, Erika runs the same speed test on the two or three competitors that pulled ahead and shows the gap. For ecommerce, I add the 2012 Walmart figures: up to 2% more conversions for every second saved and up to 1% more revenue for every 100 ms. For B2B SaaS, Erika’s framing is sharper: a bounce costs recurring revenue, not one sale.
• Let Claude read the crawl. Erika uploads chunks of a Screaming Frog crawl into Claude to surface and prioritise issues faster, and has it build the client graphs. Make your own calls before you feed it anything. Here are 7 quick wins hiding in your last SEO crawl to start from.
• Once the global fixes are in, the Core Web Vitals and WordPress performance tactic covers the page-level clean-up.

Sources & Relevant Episodes

• Erika Braeger, Ten Speed – named page speed and URL tech debt as the most common pitfalls she sees, gave the two-megabyte rule of thumb and the replace, modify or remove decision tree, and made sampling four or five pages her one takeaway. Ten Speed’s list of 7 common technical SEO issues goes further.
• Read the full breakdown: Machine Readability First: Erika Braeger’s Technical SEO Triage for AI Search.
• Listen: Erika Braeger: If Machines Can’t Read It, You Won’t Show Up on Unscripted SEO. Watch: the full episode on YouTube. Read: the episode recap on Unscripted SEO.
• Erika’s first SOP, from her first episode: Build a Claude skill that does your pre-work.