Is Website Speed a Ranking Factor?
Website speed is one of the most critical aspects of SEO performance. If your website is just too slow, you probably won't be ranking well because people abandon it quickly (high bounce rate). With page speed being a ranking signal, you need to speed up your site by optimizing your images, merging and minifying JS and CSS, removing unnecessary plugins, enabling browser caching, etc. A website that loads below 4 seconds, ideally at two seconds, is the best user-experience. On mobile devices, you have more room to optimize as pages require fewer elements, and there's also the AMP feature, but people are less tolerant of delays. Page speed affects crawling times and indexing quantities. On a slow website, you'll find fewer pages getting indexed, thus fewer rankings and traffic.
