Page Load Time is a significant factor in determining your sites quality. Forget the bots, they are well developed these days to crawl the most difficult pages, but if you'd like to keep your visitors happy, then keeping the page load time to a minimal time would be a great idea.
Web optimization is a vital part of web development and maintenance but also something often overlooked by webmasters. Just think of the money you can save, and how it can potentially help increase your readership and traffic when they are properly done.