Is my beautiful portfolio page killing my SEO? Video vs speed

SnapperGB · October 2, 2022

I have built a portfolio page as the home page for my new website

Each of the blocks is coded to give the interact I was after. The videos are iframes from Vimeo at 240p, the smallest I think I could use.

I am happy with how it looks and love the quality of the videos vs gifs.

BUT I am a bit concerned that the video heavy page is too slow to load and that it will be held against me in the SEO arms race.

Attached is a screen grab from Pingdom.

The page is 15mb and it takes 5.6 seconds to load.

I understand the conventional wisdom is that I need to get this down to under 3 seconds. Which I guess could come from halving the page size.

So my questions are

Does it really matter? Does Google really penalise slower sites? I can imagine that my target audience- professionals, working in marketing on desktops, might be more patient than a doom scrolling consumer. So I am not overly worried about user experience but more about whether the site won't rank as well (other things being equal) as competitors.
Is Vimeo the best video delivery platform for what I am doing? I can imagine that host the films on Squarespace maybe faster/ allow me to use smaller versions- but I am not sure I can code iframes for videos on Squarespace.
Is there another way of making the videos smaller?
How can I reduce the DNS lookups? Not even sure what that is.
Would I be better off having a smaller landing page with a strong link to the portfolio?

Any other thoughts on what I can do would be very welcome.

Thanks

S

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