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Does Page Speed Affect SEO & 5 Other Questions You Have About Ranking Factors

Things can get complicated when it comes to keeping up with Google’s revolving door of ranking factors. First, there’s the matter of determining what actually impacts SEO—like high-quality content—and what’s just speculation—like domain age.

Unfortunately, Google has never released an official list of the 200 suspected SEO ranking factors, but there is empirical evidence to guide us.

The second challenge is that the ranking algorithm rarely stays consistent for more than a year or two. In November 2017, they increased the maximum recommended meta description length from 180 to 320 characters, then rolled it back by May 2018.

That said, a few tried-and-true ranking factors related to site performance have consistently proven important to SEO.

We gathered six of the most common questions about site performance ranking factors to help you in your quest to rise up the SERPs.

1. What Are Google’s Core Web Vitals?

You’ve probably heard a lot about Core Web Vitals in recent years. Google rolled these metrics out in 2020 as part of their Page Experience update and emphasized that site owners should prioritize delivering fast, visually stable content.

The three Core Web Vitals include the following:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures loadingperformance, indicating the point at which main content has likely loaded.
• First-input delay (FID) measures interactivity, from the user clicking a button, tapping a link, etc., to the point where the browser responds to the interaction.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) quantifies how much the page layout shifts during the loading phase, which is often caused by elements loading asynchronously.

2. Does Page Speed Affect SEO?

Yes, page speed significantly impacts SEO.

Unlike many other ranking factors, Google has been transparent about its emphasis on speed. The first official announcement in 2010 only affected desktop searches, but it expanded to the mobile search rankings in 2018.

3. What Is a Good Page Speed for SEO?

Google collects four metrics to create its PageSpeed Insight (PSI) report for a particular site. Two of them—LCP and CLS—are components of their Core Web Vitals.

The others consist of:

• Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures the delay between when a user interacts with an element and when the browser displays the result of that interaction.
• First Contentful Paint (FCP) is the time it takes from when a user starts loading a page until any element renders on their screen.

Each one is given a score of Good, Needs Improvement, or Poor.

You can use Uptime.com’s Page Speed Test to collect your own data and continuously monitor Google’s evaluation of your PSI.

Google has released an official Quality of Experiences chart—as of March 2024—that can help you quickly assess where you stand:

However, you don’t have to wait for Google to give you a PSI report to know where you stand. Uptime.com’s Page Speed Test empowers you to collect your own data to make meaningful improvements before they impact your rankings.

4. Do Mobile-Friendly Sites Rank Higher on SERPs?

Yes, since the release of its Mobile-First Indexing policy in 2018, Google has predominantly used the mobile version of a site’s content for indexing and ranking.

This decision follows the dramatic increase in mobile search market share, jumping from 14.04% in December 2012 to 52.48% by December 2017.

It was a brilliant, preemptive strike on their part. Mobile has only continued to dominate search, peaking at 61.79% as of July 2024.

5. How Does Google Measure User Experience?

Because Google’s crawlers can’t “use” your website, they rely on a set of markers they can measure to approximate the user experience:

• Core Web Vitals: If you still doubt whether it was worth your effort to work on your Core Web Vitals, it also affects your UX score. Failing to monitor and optimize site performance means taking multiple hits to your ranking potential.
• Security: Google wants to deliver a secure browsing experience, and using HTTPS proves that your site can provide that.
• Mobile-friendliness: Given the Mobile-First Indexing approach, Google places more weight on sites that can provide a satisfactory user experience from a smartphone browser.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of people who leave your site after viewing a single page is called the bounce rate. High bounce rates could indicate that the content isn’t compelling enough to explore further or that you don’t have enough internal links to guide users to other relevant content.
• Dwell time: Similar to bounce rate, dwell refers to the amount of time that a visitor spends on a single page before returning to search results. Pages with longer dwell times indicate that the content is engaging and valuable enough to keep people reading.
• Click-through rate: The higher your CTR, the more likely your page titles and meta descriptions are relevant to what the user searched for.

6. Can Downtime Hurt My Rankings?

Yes, downtime can wreak havoc on your rankings in multiple ways, starting with the user experience.

Now that we’ve covered topics like Core Web Vitals and UX rankings, it’s a bit easier to see why downtime creates a cascade of issues that impact your SEO:

1. When searchers reach a downed site, they’re far more likely to leave and not return, which drags down your dwell time and skyrockets the bounce rate.
2. As Google sends its crawlers out to index a website, they won’t be able to access your site during downtime. Because it can’t deliver the most up-to-date content to searchers, your users aren’t receiving the ideal experience you hope to provide.
3. Over time, frequent downtime has a ripple effect. As users come to see your site as one that isn’t always available, your reputation takes a hit, and people are far less likely to visit again.
4. Then, as you erode Google’s trust in your ability to deliver a reliable website, you’ll drop in the search rankings to make way for other options that can meet the search engine’s goal of providing the best possible results on stable sites.

Take Control of Your Site’s Success

It’s clear that websites can’t afford to make mistakes when it comes to delivering 99.9% uptime or providing a seamless, fast-loading site experience.

So, what’s the best way to stay on track?

Sign up for a demo or trial today and experience how Uptime.com’s Website Monitoring Service detects and alerts you to downtime and performance bottlenecks before they impact your users.

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