How relevant a page speed really is?

A

arqba

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So, my website ranks for some keywords and I have already some traffic, about 180 visitors/day. I know that its speed is slow, some pages take up to 2 seconds to load. I guess most is between 1 and 2 seconds.
I didn't wanted to buy a new host because mine hasn't expired yet and it would be a new cost to the website.
But I want to understand what I'm losing for having a slow website.
If I bought a faster host, my website would significantly rank better? Or it's not that important?
 
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It´s important. Buy a cdn from BunnyCDN and your site will get a bit faster for your visitors. Cost is minimal, from a dollar a month.
 
Not enough information.
Page speed is determined by more than just your server hardware. It more depends on the efficiency of your website code.
Look at your cpanel stats (or whatever portal you use to observe) and see how much ram/cpu/bandwith is being stressed.
More than likely you can fix it by running https://gtmetrix.com/ and following the advisories by fixing all problem areas until you are scoring "A".
Using a CDN is great benefit too like @RoiBox suggests. You've probably heard of Cloudflare.
As to does page speed effect rank? Answer is yes -- dozens of threads on this forum & Google will demonstrate with details. Imo it effects CR% strongly too.
 
Google prefer faster website. So, it's always good thing to keep your website fast.
 
Make your website faster for better user experience and a possible boost in rankings, because google loves fast loading sites. So Look into improvements before considering a new hosting service to keep costs in check.
 
Page loading speed and useability scores that are displayed in GSC can have a huge impact on ranking performance I have seen it before where a website owner has had added a new feature to the site which had a big impact on website speed and at the same time they also saw a big drop in traffic performance due to rankings dropping. Clear corelation could be seen in GSC.
 
uncutu said:
Not enough information.
Page speed is determined by more than just your server hardware. It more depends on the efficiency of your website code.
Look at your cpanel stats (or whatever portal you use to observe) and see how much ram/cpu/bandwith is being stressed.
More than likely you can fix it by running https://gtmetrix.com/ and following the advisories by fixing all problem areas until you are scoring "A".
Using a CDN is great benefit too like @RoiBox suggests. You've probably heard of Cloudflare.
As to does page speed effect rank? Answer is yes -- dozens of threads on this forum & Google will demonstrate with details. Imo it effects CR% strongly too.
Click to expand...

@arqba I personally advise against using GTMetrix as it still uses the outdated Lighthouse version compared to other tools. Lighthouse is the basic software made by Google that analyses the website and each update is essential as it changes the importance of certain issues and therefore gives a different output score and suggestions.

However, the main thing to remember is that tools only give a sort of partial opinion on the current status of the website in terms of performance. In other words, the problem you see on Lighthouse/PageSpeed Insights and the related recommendations are not completely mandatory to improve SEO. While following them and getting higher scores could have a direct impact on SEO, it's not always the case... especially if you're using automated tools or don't know exactly what a particular advisory does.

For example, if PageSpeed Insights highlights that there's too much Javascript code, but that code is essential for the site to display correctly, you could end up destroying your site UI-wise just to get that 90+ score...that wouldn't make any difference to SEO as it could lead to other metrics being badly affected.

Instead, my goal (and your goal should be) is to understand the site, remove the non-essential and maintain the best UI/UX experience while increasing speed.
 
It's only important not to be very slow. It's important not to take 10 seconds to access your site. When it comes to milliseconds, i don't think it matters that much.
 
As soon as you buy a new good setup plan for your site, it will load faster. This will help your site's SERP movements.
 
Yes, Google prefers website speed. Since for few of my clients I changed to a better separate hostings and it resulted in ranking improvement.
 
Page speed is very important.
For accessibility & seo bosting both.
 
are you using shared hosting? If so, I highly recommend migrating to a VPS hosting
 
yes, Definitely you will get a immense impact if you make better hosting.
 
arqba said:
So, my website ranks for some keywords and I have already some traffic, about 180 visitors/day. I know that its speed is slow, some pages take up to 2 seconds to load. I guess most is between 1 and 2 seconds.
I didn't wanted to buy a new host because mine hasn't expired yet and it would be a new cost to the website.
But I want to understand what I'm losing for having a slow website.
If I bought a faster host, my website would significantly rank better? Or it's not that important?
Click to expand...
So speeding up your site could make customers happier and might help your site do a bit better in search results, but it's not the only thing that matters for ranking higher.
 
You could optimize it by compressing images and using a cache plugin
Less than 1s load time puts you ahead of a lot of sites
 
arqba said:
So, my website ranks for some keywords and I have already some traffic, about 180 visitors/day. I know that its speed is slow, some pages take up to 2 seconds to load. I guess most is between 1 and 2 seconds.
I didn't wanted to buy a new host because mine hasn't expired yet and it would be a new cost to the website.
But I want to understand what I'm losing for having a slow website.
If I bought a faster host, my website would significantly rank better? Or it's not that important?
Click to expand...
Page speed is indeed very relevant, both for SEO and for user experience. Here’s why:
  1. User Experience: A fast-loading page can lead to higher engagement rates, higher conversion rates, and better overall user experience. If a page takes too long to load, users are likely to leave, increasing the bounce rate and reducing dwell time
  2. SEO Ranking: Google has used page speed as a ranking factor since 2010. A slow-loading website can hurt your Google rankings. Google might be specifically measuring time to the first byte when it considers page speed.
  3. Crawl Budget: A slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget, which could negatively affect your indexation.
  4. Mobile Indexing: With the shift towards mobile-first indexing, page speed becomes even more critical as users on mobile devices are often on slower connections.
  5. Conversion Rates: Fast-loading sites have higher conversion rates. Attention spans are notoriously short, and a fast page improves the overall user experience.
In conclusion, page speed is a critical factor in SEO and user experience, and optimizing your page speed should be a key part of your SEO strategy.
 
SE's, customers, users, potential partners, potential business sales, all care about speed of websites...

Heck I'm probably missing half the folk.
 
1-2 seconds isn't terrible, but there's room for improvement. Google does factor in site speed for rankings, but it's one piece of the puzzle. Before switching hosts, try optimizing your current site. Compress images, leverage browser caching, minimize CSS/JS files, and consider a CDN.
 
Google loves those website who have user friendly. So slow website count as unfair. So you can move to cloud hosting or ad CDN for faster website.
 
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