Page speed decides whether anyone stays long enough to read. For rankings, it is a tie-breaker.

Yes. Google announced site speed as a new signal in its search ranking algorithms in April 2010, and said at launch that it affected fewer than 1 % of search queries. Speed was a signal from the start, and a small one.

Core Web Vitals are Google's measures of loading, responsiveness and visual stability as real users experience them. Google announced a page experience signal combining them with existing signals in May 2020. They turn a vague sense of speed into numbers.

Google's documentation says that beyond Core Web Vitals, other page experience aspects “don't directly help your website rank higher in search results”, while they make a website more satisfying to use. Speed can separate pages of similar relevance. It cannot lift an irrelevant page.

Because people decide in seconds whether a page is worth waiting for. Every second of loading time is a second in which the back button competes with the content. The ranking brings the click, and speed decides whether the click becomes a reader.

If load time made no difference, visitors would leave a slow page as rarely as a fast one. The bounce probability rises with every second and more than doubles by 10 seconds.

Google moved to indexing the mobile version of sites, starting experiments in 2016 and completing the move in October 2023. Mobile connections and devices are where slowness hurts most. A page that is fast only on a desktop is judged by its mobile version.

Waiting adds effort without adding value. Relevance theory describes relevance as effect weighed against effort, so a slow page lowers its own relevance in the reader's mind. The same content is worth less when it arrives late.

Large images, heavy scripts, third-party tags and fonts, and layouts that shift while loading. Many of these are added for marketing and measurement. Each one should earn its cost in waiting time.

Rarely. Compressing images, removing unused scripts, deferring what is not needed at first view and serving plain HTML often achieve most of the gain. Speed is mostly a matter of leaving things out.

With field data from real users, such as the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console, alongside lab tests. Lab tests show causes, field data shows what people actually experience. Decisions should rest on the second.

Load the answer first, keep what the reader needs above everything else, and remove what only the publisher wants. A fast page that answers the user intent keeps the visitor it earned. A fast page that answers nothing only loses them faster.