Does Website Speed Actually Impact Your Google Rankings?
Bradley Phillips
Jun 17, 2025
TL;DR
Yes, page speed does impact Google Rankings (a “teeny tiny” bit)
More importantly, user experience suffers on slow sites
This causes conversions to drop
A question we get asked all to frequently is "...but does my website speed actually impact my Google rankings?" We did the research and here are the takeaways.
The answer is, yes. Page speed does impact your Google Rankings, just not in the way most people think. Its impact is indirect via the user experience. If your site is slow, you’re almost certainly limiting your potential on Google and leaving money on the table.
Let’s get the Google stuff out of the way
Google made page speed a ranking factor for mobile way back in 2018. Then doubled down in 2021 with the Page Experience update, introducing something called Core Web Vitals. This is a group of metrics that essentially measure how fast, stable, and interactive your site feels using:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How fast your page’s main content appears. Aim for under 2.5s.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP): How quickly your site responds to clicks, taps, etc. Aim for under 200ms.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): If your content shifts around while loading. Aim for under 0.1.
Despite all this, Google admits page speed is only a “teeny tiny” direct ranking factor.
Gary Illyes is an Analyst on the Google Search team.
Website speed matters more in indirect ways. Google is watching how users behave on your site and rewards websites that provide a good user experience. If the user bounces straight away because the page is taking forever to load, that’s a bad signal.
Search engines reward good user experience. And slow sites are the opposite of that.
User experience is where speed really shows its value
Users expect pages to load instantly. And when they don’t they close the tab or hit back and move on.
A BBC study found that for every extra second a page took to load, 10% more users abandoned it.
So while a slow site might still technically work, it’s frustrating your users. So whether you're selling something or just trying to keep people reading, website speed matters.
On mobile where internet connections are usually slower, think 4g, this problem is even worse.
Speed and conversion rates (aka the money bit)
Ignoring Google for a second, a HubSpot study found that a site that loads in 1 seconds converts 3x better than one that loads in 5 seconds. Stretch that to 10 seconds, and the faster site performs 5x better.
Vodafone improved their LCP by 31% and saw:
A 15% jump in leads
An 8% increase in sales
These aren’t small numbers. Faster websites lead to more conversions. And this should matter to you more.
So what slows websites down?
Lots of things. But the biggest culprits we see are:
Bad hosting or slow servers
Bloated code
Uncompressed images and videos
Too many third-party scripts (analytics, tracking, chat widgets, etc.)
No caching or CDN in place
And if you're using a heavy CMS or an off-the-shelf theme loaded with plugins (looking at you, Wordpress), it’s almost guaranteed you’ve got room for improvement.
How to actually make your site faster
The best place to start is by running your site through Google PageSpeed Insights.
That tool will tell you what’s slowing things down and it’s built by the same people who decide where your site ranks. Handy.
Here are a few fixes that make a big difference:
Optimise images: resize them properly, compress them, convert to WebP
Minify your code: remove unnecessary characters, combine CSS/JS files
Lazy load off-screen content: don’t load what users can’t see yet
Use a CDN: serve static assets (like images) from servers closer to your users
Enable caching: so return visitors don’t have to load everything from scratch
You don’t need to hit a perfect PageSpeed score, you likely never will. But if your site is taking 6 seconds to load right now, cutting that down to 2–3 seconds can completely change how users interact with it and how Google sees it.
Final thoughts
Fast sites win. Be a winner.
And if you want the in-depth version with all the stats, metrics, tools and fixes, you can check out the full write-up over here:
