People tend to give more credit to website speed than merited and attribute to it properties and powers it doesn’t have.
Examples:
Indexation
People think that part of (or all of) their indexation issues are caused by the low website speed when the truth is, that their SEO team is underperforming dramatically.
Higher rankings and organic traffic
Another misconception, which creates a lot of confusion among webmasters. It is the fault of Google for not having cleared up this point. Plus, many bloggers feed the myth (read further below). Higher website speeds, even a 100% score, don’t equal automatically better positions and more organic traffic. I know about it and have the proof, as all my pages and blog posts score 100% on mobile and desktop.
I’m providing website speed services, I should be saying otherwise but facts are facts and if we continue feeding misinformation to the public we will make this another SEO myth. Many will say otherwise, and I suggest you vet them thoroughly. High website speed creates (indirectly) a better user experience, which is a ranking factor.
There’s no official document that says if you get to the speed top you will rank #1 in organic results. What those bloggers make is a methodological error. They find data correlation and interpret it as causation. Just because they find the top 10 pages having good speeds it doesn’t (and shouldn’t mean) they got to the top 10 for their speed performance. It simply means they decided at some point to improve their online presence by offering a much better experience to visitors (correlation people, it is just correlation).
a 100% page speed score doesn’t mean you get top rankings even when all the competitors have bad speeds.
What they fail to attribute to a fast website is better (server) resource management, reduction of server errors (the 5xx type), considerable reduction in database errors, better user experience, and lower bounce rate, which do matter to getting higher positions in organic search, etc.
Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash