Everyone needs to give up a little to make the tech work for user rather than for the brand.
Life is all about balance (and stakeholder management), right? Well that is easier said than done, many of us are bad at work life balance in real life, we know all the theory and can talk about in staff meetings and at leadership forums and so on, we are just not very good at applying the knowledge to ourselves, its like weight loss, just eat less and move more, anyone can nail that, can't they.
So in the world of e-commerce or any kind of consumer facing digital life we know that speediness is close to godliness but verbosity and poor UX are the devil incarnate, and speed on a mobile is even more godly, agreed! Its easy, just make it leaner and faster.
However time and time again I go to meetings where people are not willing to give things up to facilitate this. Owners, brand managers, marketers, legal, sales managers, sales support. They all want their bit front and central. What you hear is, "The hero images are important to our brand story, we must have video, with out xxx there is no colour and movement, the PDS must stay, live support must be over the fold, the portrait logo is not negotiable, the tag line must be legible, we don't like hamburger menus, the owner prefers tabs (all 8 of them), we have always done it this way, it must show case our full product range etc, etc, etc.
Of course the customer can have what ever they want it is their online asset, but Google have made their requirements clear when comes to above all ranking and ad quality scores, this is driven by their stated desire to give the Google user a better experience, not by any desire to punish a brand. Since most searches start on a mobile device its all about mobile speed.
Following their directives is backed by research that you can find on think Think with Google or test my site.
If you invest in SEO and SEO friendly engineering and all the delights of on page optimisation and you put time into your linkages but your pages are slow on mobile you are wasting some of your money.
If you are paying for clicks and your staff or agency are executing great campaigns in Google or on social media but your site is slow, you are wasting some of your money and messing with your ROI and CPA data.
Your SEO, search marketing and product may be in the zone but your conversion wont be truly reflect your effort.
How much is it costing you to keep the hero images, fancy graphics, video testimonials, tracking lines and all those links? Well if your page load on a mobile using 4G is 7 secs for a commuter on the 535pm train then you have just increased your chance of a bounce by 123%. That is correct 123% and with that your SEO or paid click expense is wasted and so is the opportunity to serve the customer when you were top of mind. You may if you are lucky get a chance to re-serve the customer or a desk top later which will show case your great site, but you may not, are you happy with that?
Consider if your customer is a 50 plus demographic the chances are they are on an older slower smart phone so even if they are more patient than millennials they may still bounce.
So what can you do, you have invested in your brand, your site, SEO, PPC, Social Media, content creation etc? Take advantage of the work you have done, just take a step back, read this article by Googler Danial An and apply the recommend learnings in a review.
What can you live with out, how can you do the right thing by the consumer and then your business and brand but still project your desired quality. Re imagine yourself leaner and faster, it is painful you do mostly need to lose a lot. There is a lot to gain, after you get them to your site they are yours to lose but first get them there (fast). It is easy just like weight loss or work life balance. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/data-measurement/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks