Page Load Speed as a Ranking vs User Experience Factor

[djbaxter]

Web Hosting for Optimized Page Load Speed
by Adam Thompson, Search Engine Journal
December 10, 2015

[T]his study shows no correlation between page complete load times and Google rankings, but it did find a correlation for time to first byte. Another study also found no correlation between rankings and page load time. It seems likely that the impact of page load speed on rankings is very small, so as SEOs it?s important that we don?t present page load speed as a major factor in rankings.

[On the other hand], the impact of page load speed on users is likely much greater than its impact on Google rankings. Multiple studies have consistently documented the impact of page load speed on user experience ? slow load times lead to user abandonment and decreased conversion rates. Scale does matter when discussing this benefit, though. An incremental improvement in conversion rate (which is huge for large e-retailers) may translate to a very small monetary benefit for websites with small traffic numbers.

Thompson goes on to discuss the specific ways in which your hosting service and/or plan contributes to load speed.

Read more...

 

[mborgelt]

Sitespeed is our bread and butter but there is little hard and fast data about the areas to emphasis besides what GTmetrix and the others recommend. We have observed decreasing total site speed result in an increase in rank but have never established a 1:1 or pin-pointed it down to a specific part of the page load protocol. Thanks for the share!

 

[JacobMaslow]

Not all ranking factors are progressive.

If your site is extremely slow, that can impact rankings. The page speed aspect of the algorithm simply serves to protect users from being frustrated by a page that wont load timely. If site A is faster than site B, that will not make a difference.

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/site-speed/

"The main thing I want to get across is: don’t panic. We mentioned site speed as early as last year, and you can watch this video from February where I pointed out that we still put much more weight on factors like relevance, topicality, reputation, value-add, etc. — all the factors that you probably think about all the time. Compared to those signals, site speed will carry much less weight."