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I have a pretty slow site. This is what WMT measured: enter image description here
Now I know speed is a factor in SEO, but considering it is very difficult to make the site faster, I'm trying to evaluate the ROI of this effort. Do you believe considering my current site speed, this can make a significant effect to my rankings? Any estimate in % SEO traffic growth? Also, is the speed seo factor measured as site average or per page?

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    Don't expect any unless your site was so slow that you were being penalized.
    – John Conde ♦
    Apr 7, 2014 at 13:57
  • penalized comes with a WMT warning message? How slow is that?
    – Noam
    Apr 7, 2014 at 13:59
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    Google hasn't given a threshold other than the lowest 1 or 2% of sites. I would assume a GWT message would be given but haven't seen or heard anything to confirm that.
    – John Conde ♦
    Apr 7, 2014 at 14:00
  • i was under the impression that google stated sites should be load in under 2 seconds.
    – Liam Sorsby
    Apr 7, 2014 at 14:35

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Actually, your site is not slow. The graph is in milliseconds. Your download speeds hover around 1 to 1.5 seconds. That is actually pretty good. Yes there are faster sites, but you would be surprised by what sites are slower. Keep in mind that Google is not kind when measuring these numbers. And your numbers are okay. Keep in mind, much of your download speed has nothing to do with what you are able to control. For example DNS response times. You are okay here. These numbers reflect the entire experience from query, domain name resolution, on downward.

To answer your question. SEO is not generally effected by speed if found within a normal range which you are well within. Remember that SEO is a two part consideration. Ranking a site within the index, and SERP placement. Speed does not effect metrics like pagerank and so forth. But t will effect placement in the SERPs. Google does arrange SERPs according to speed to help boost the user experience. That does not mean that a slower site always losses. Not at all. But sites of similar results will compete based upon factors including speed. Sites that seem to answer the search query well regardless of site speed will place higher in the SERPs unless the site is within a range that Google feels is too slow.

Yes speed is an issue. But not for your site. You are well within the range of faster sites. Or at least, fast enough!

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Your site is not slow by any means, you are within the average, so you shouldn't face problems with the UX.

If your visitors find your sites too slow, then they will leave rather fast and this will have a negative effect in your rankings, because Google will consider that your site doesn't solve the questions of the users, but in your case it shouldn't be a problem...

You can check the average load speeds here. Furthermore, here are some stats that your site meets:

  1. 47% of users expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less
  2. 40% of people abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load
  3. According to Pingdom, the average load time for a page is 5 seconds.

As you can see, your website's load speed is pretty good.

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