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Site Speed’s Impact on SEO Site speed is a ranking factor and an even larger ranking factor for mobile pages. Google is rolling out a Mobile First index moving forward, which will officially take effect in July 2018, meaning now is the time to optimize for mobile site speed so you’re not on the losing team when it officially rolls out. With that being said, we have already seen the direct impact that site speed has on our clients’ websites’ SEO rankings and organic traffic. The reason why site speed is a ranking factor is that it is, first and foremost, a sign of quality user experience. A fast site speed will result in a better user experience, while a slow site speed will result in a poor user experience. A user is typically staying on a site longer if the site speed is faster and they also convert better and bounce less. For those reasons, Google has made it a ranking factor. Related: Improve Website Speed with these 5 Quick Tips We view three to four seconds or less as a good page load time. This varies slightly based on the type of site and industry but typically if your web pages load in under three to four seconds, you’re doing well. Once you exceed that load time, we start to see less optimal rankings as well as a poorer user experience. Conversely, if we brought this page speed down to sub-three to four seconds we would likely see better rankings. We have seen the effects of this first-hand with a client. We implemented site speed optimizations on a client’s website and the client’s developer accidentally removed the work we had done. The website with the site speed optimizations went from a four-second load time to a 12-second load time after the optimizations were removed, which caused rankings to plummet. We went back in and updated the site with the proper site speed optimizations again and got the website back to a four-second load time and rankings went back up. This illustrated in real-time that site speed has a direct link to SEO and keyword rankings. This is rare, as almost nothing happens in real-time for SEO, it’s a slow and steady wins the race scenario, but we saw the ranking impact in just a few days when site speed optimizations were stripped and then re-implemented. It was a great experiment because we already knew site speed made an impact on SEO, but this really showed the emphasis Google is placing on it for mobile and desktop from a search perspective. The benefits of site speed on user experience impact other digital channels as well, like paid search.

If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We've also blogged about site performance.Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven't seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

GTmetrix is effectively a one-stop-shop for all of your speed optimization needs.

Google also integrated Lighthouse into Chrome Devtools.

one of the most important things when it comes to website speed testing is to pick one tool and stick with it. Each has their own set of different metrics and therefore you can’t compare one tool’s test results to another

The duplicate content penalty doesn’t exist.

It isn’t helpful to focus on individual ranking signals because search engine algorithms are too sophisticated for this to be a useful way of conceptualizing algorithms.

Google’s algorithms have gotten better at understanding these types of low-quality backlinks and knowing when they should be ignored. As a result, the need for SEO pros to maintain and update a disavow file has diminished significantly

no single tool really gives us a complete end-to-end analysis

When you use the three tools together, they will give you a better understanding of real-world performance and optimization opportunities.

You should be aiming to create pages no larger than 3 megabytes (MB), and smaller when possible

Google is ramping up their efforts on data as well, including sourcing more data than ever before from users. Google is gathering more data with things like Google My Business Q&A that will likely be used for voice search if it’s not already. Google Webmaster Trend Analyst Gary Illyes stated at Pubcon Vegas in 2017 that there will be more focus on structured data and more applications for the data this year.

Google has also been saying it will look into speed being a more prominent metric for the mobile-first index. Right now, it’s basically on/off, and you’re only hurt by speed if you’re really too slow — but they may actually weight this heavier or change how they handle the weight based on the speed in the future.

The tools I’m talking about are Distilled ODN, Updatable from Ayima, RankSense and RankScience. They give you full control of the DOM (Document Object Model) before the website is served. It’s like having a prerender where you can change anything you want about your website. These systems have the potential solve a lot of major issues, but I wonder about their longevity, even though they are fairly new, as the previously mentioned Cloudflare Workers could do these changes as well.